Re: Thought I'd throw this in ;-) for the sake of conversation.

["Frank J. Lhota" <NOSPAM.lhota.adarose@verizon.net>]

"Nick Roberts" <nick.roberts@acm.org> wrote in message 
news:2rig76F1b49udU1@uni-berlin.de...
>>    % ls
>>    foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
>>    % rm * .o
>>    rm: .o: No such file or directory
>>    % ls
>>    %
>
> And in fact, a fellow student at my university did precisely this. I had 
> the unfortunate task of telling her that all her coursework for the last 
> two weeks was gone. Luckily she got it back (from systems daily backup), 
> but lost a day's work all the same.

I remember once wanting to copy all *.txt from the working directory to 
another location. I mistakenly entered the command

    % cp *.txt

leaving off the destination directory. This did not produce an error 
message.  You see, there were only two *.txt files at the time, so this 
command simply copied over the second one with the contents of the first 
one!

> And people still ask me, in querulous tones, why I hate Unix so much.

Well, OTOH it can also be quite powerful. The ideal OS should combine both 
power and safety.

> -- 
> Nick Roberts