is sinix rm -r * different ?

[Ruediger Helsch]

In article <1990Jun20.073620.15486 at diku.dk> nomann at rimfaxe.diku.dk (Ole Nomann Thomsen) writes:
>Recently, I heard about some poor superuser, that tried to delete all of
>a users files by cd'ing to the users $HOME and "rm -r *"'ing. This
>producede more than the desired result, since his `*' expanded to `.' and
>even `..' too. ("Gurfle" to cite the hackers jargon posings).

Happened simailarly to me. One evening I was in a hurry removing files on /tmp.
I typed "rm -rf *", but a listing showed me that there were some files
(beginning with '.') not removed. So i repeated "rm -rf .*". I waited for a
response, and after maybe 15 seconds i became suspicious something might go
wrong. I aborted with ^C, but too late. I typed "ls", and the answer was
"ls: command not found". The /bin directory was already gone. It was going
to be a long night.