Re: Reverse Wildcarding

>      Quick story: When employed "many years ago" at a company that has
> since moved many times, I used to keep my resume in a directory named
> .private with permissions 700 so that, at least in theory I was the only
> one who could go in there, and the "." at the front of the name hid it even
> more so. One day I was doing some system maintenance (as root via "su -"
> instead of the slightly less dangerous "su"). I had just accepted another
> job elsewhere but hadn't announced my departure. Anyway, I decided I had
> better remove the ~/.private directory and its contents so, in a momentary
> lapse of good judgement, I typed "cd ; rm -rf .*" hoping to save myself the
> trouble of typing out ".private". Well, the system chugged along for about
> 30 seconds before the guy in the next cubicle said to no one in particular,
> "Is the system down?" As you may have recognized, ".*" matched ".." which
> means "go up one level" and, since I was the root user, my "cd" had taken
> me to "/root" and, in the wink of an eye, all the files on the system were
> gone. Good thing I had another job already lined up...
>      Use of the little back-quote characters will put you into the same
> very powerful, and very dangerous area as my very bad use of a wildcard.
> They're handy little gadgets when used well.