There are few things as scary as the command rm -rf. It deletes everything (it’s allowed to) without asking, recursively. Use it in the wrong place or on the wrong target and welcome to the “oh fuck” zone.

I don’t think I’ve ever had it run amok though, mostly because I don’t use the -f switch much. If something can’t be trivially deleted then it should ask me just in case. There are really damn scary stories out there about how bugs combined with rm -rf can ruin stuff.

I don’t exactly know how I ended up in the situation I did. The root of all evil was a hardlink to a directory on my server. I thought Ubuntu didn’t allow that (my server runs Ubuntu too and I just tested locally that it doesn’t let me create one), but it was still there in my www folder, pointing at the folder that contained my blog’s stuff.

Yeah, past tense.