An amusing and helpful trick that I learned was to keep a file named "-i" in the directories that you want to protect. Glob style pattern matching picks it up a

An amusing and helpful trick that I learned was to keep a file named "-i" in the directories that you want to protect. Glob style pattern matching picks it up and the program rm interprets it as the "-i" flag. It is of course not quite foolproof as it can be subverted, but it has saved the day on occasions, particularly one of my friend's. I had a friend who, for totally incomprehensible reasons, would name his files with * s and "."s only and then try to delete one of them with predictable and undesired results. Well, I have done stupid things myself, for example typing "rm -rf / some_dir" instead of "rm -rf /some_dir". I noticed because it was taking a wee bit too long. It is always good to do an ls with the intended pattern first, to check what all files and directories are being matched before invoking rm with the same pattern.