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

[Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>]

>>>>> "Frank" == Frank J Lhota <NOSPAM.lhota.adarose@verizon.net> writes:

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

    Frank> % cp *.txt

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

In a university Prac class, I once typed in:

% ls ../abc.*
../abc.c ../abc.bak

$ mv ../abc.*

% ls

% ls ..
../abc.bak

The (confused) tutor thought I had lost all my work. Fortunately, I
realized (after studying these commands for a while) I hadn't lost
anything...

(at the time I think I was more familiar with MS-DOS; this was a
valuable learning experience in differences between how command line
parameters are processed between the two systems)

Now I have "mv", "cp" and "rm" aliased to use the "-i" flag.
-- 
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>