I was working on a shell script this morning to make my life easier on some trivial task. The last few lines looked a little like this.
somedir=/mnt/tmp
mv $somedir/*.txt ~
rm -rf $somdir/*
Obviously I meant to remove all the files in the directory, however a typo in the variable name led to the deletion of /. I caught it before it got to the home folder, but bin and dev were gone resulting in a broken system that needed to be reinstalled.
Never delete * as root unless you are sure you know what you are doing….