My last night on a job seven years ago, cleaning up the desktop I used next to the rack which ran the operation, I used an ill advised `rm -rf`, which like the OP's took too long to run. By the time I took note of what I had done and pounded on Control-C for a while, I had done some damage to my home directory. Fortunately it was something of a mess and I had mostly deleted large cache's buried in .dot files at the beginning of the alphabet, without doing too much damage to the archives I was leaving for those who were to come later.

One of the guys who helped to set up our systems in that office once advised me to never be root after midnight. I also have learned to never run a DELETE FROM, until I had run a SELECT FROM using the same WHERE clause.

I also have had an awful experience asking a script to `rm files`. My path on that command was programmatically built, and a bug in that code did some damage. I'm pretty cautious now about letting a script use `rm` for any reason, particularly if any wildcards are involved.

-- Hugh

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