Technically doesn't prevent rm -rf /* itself, but still goes long way to prevent a disaster: use a snapshotting filesystem, like NILFS2 http://en.wikipedia.org/

Technically doesn't prevent rm -rf /* itself, but still goes long way to prevent a disaster: use a snapshotting filesystem, like NILFS2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NILFS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NILFS Some solutions here center on avoiding issuing rm -rf /* interactively... that's not enough! A broken script or unexpected variable expansion can wreak just as much havoc. For example rm -rf $SOMEDIR/* : - if $SOMEDIR is empty, or - (if you suffer from bash) if $SOMEDIR contains trailing space so it will be expanded into separate words: SOMEDIR='foo '; rm -rf $SOMEDIR/* => rm -rf foo /* (which means, `remove ./foo and remove /* ') An alias won't help if full path to command is specified; that is quite common for start-up scripts. I have experienced consequences of rm -rf /* once or twice. Now I pause for a moment every time I am about to remove something and double-check the command. Sometimes even prepend `echo' for a dry run ;-) Edit: another nasty case of unintended deletion I had was due to a dumb Makefile rule: $(CC) -o $(OUTFILE) $(INFILE) for some reason $(OUTFILE) ended up empty, so outupt went to $(INFILE) -- a C source file -- effectively removing its content. How would I guard against that kind of data loss? A snapshotting filesystem...