I'd give 2 responses depending on what you mean by that: 1. As sibling comment notes, at least GNU rm does make some effort to protect you. 2. I would suggest

I'd give 2 responses depending on what you mean by that: 1. As sibling comment notes, at least GNU rm does make some effort to protect you. 2. I would suggest that any further protection is just going to get in the way. For example, I've run into systems that aliased rm to `rm -I`: -I prompt once before removing more than three files, or when removing recursively; less intrusive than -i, while still giving protection against most mistakes but I almost always promptly override that because sometimes yes I do actually want to delete a lot of files in a lot of places and I am not having this argument with the machine. Or as has been put more elegantly: “Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.” — Douglas Gwyn