[zeugma]

rm -rf / home/zeugma/trash/*

The above is double plus ungood.

[re_nortex]

rm -rf / home/zeugma/trash/*

There's a whole section devoted to such errors due to inadvertent whitespace creeping into commands in The Unix Haters Handbook. One that's caught me far too often than I care to admit is hitting a space before the dot:

rm * .~

The handbook states that such botches are "rites of passage" in the Unix world. In a sense that's true because I've become an absolute fanatic about backups since my last real disaster of that sort in 1993. Sure the GUIs help protect against such things, but I'm just quicker when working at the shell.

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Shadow Ace and rdb3: I really should've pinged both of you at the outset of this thread. So this makes up for lost time. :)