Accept my condolences.

Keep backups of everything important. All development should take place in a version control system, and you should run any script on testing data first.

It might sound pedantic and tedious, but after accidents like yours, it all starts to make sense.

Also, don't blame Perl. It was you who deleted the desktop, not Perl ;-)

I've deleted lots of photographs, videos, and whole directories of files accidentally. Some of them were lost forever, some of them were recovered from backup copies. When touching anything of importance, I always switch the mode "production environment" on.