[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. :)

[re_nortex]

In my prior post about the Unix Haters Handbook, be sure to read the Anti-Foreword composed by the late Dennis Ritchie (well known to many as dmr), who died on 2011-10-12. With no disrespect intended at all for Steve Jobs, I submit the following graphic as a way of remembering the contributions of dmr:

I'll add that I've had the pleasure of communicating on occasion via e-mail with Dennis. Without fail, he always responded, even to my oft-stupid questions and was far more courteous to me than I deserved with my bothersome messages.

[zeugma]

The handbook states that such botches are "rites of passage" in the Unix world.

It is. One of the questions I ask in job interviews is for the most spectacular example of when they completely trashed a system. More than anything else, it's a character question. Anyone who's been a unix admin for long enough will have at least one really good one. If they can't come up with anything, I question how hands-on they actually are.