The chances of such a file coming into existence accidentally When sharing servers with less UNIX savvy developers you will observe A) a notoriously polluted h

The chances of such a file coming into existence accidentally When sharing servers with less UNIX savvy developers you will observe A) a notoriously polluted home-directory and B) plenty of files with funny names such as -, * , user@server.com (from failed scp attempts) all over the place. It's indeed relatively hard to create a file called '/' by accident. But I've seen files containing the '/' along with spaces, which can be just as deadly. Oh and the popular * -file is not to be taken lightly either. As a rule of thumb: Learn the safe way to chain these commands (find/xargs in particular) once and stick to it. And always perform a dry-run before launching the real deal.