Hello. Someone just recently made a post on reddit( https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/r542lz/) about adding an accidental space in a path to the command line and running `rm -rf XXX /*/*`. Before that, the bumble bee install script did `rm -rf /usr` by accident( https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/issues/123) and I also made the same mistake at some point while learning linux.
Maybe rm should have either a new mode for everyday use, like --preserve-root=paranoid or even be paranoid in the default mode preserve-root=all: I suggest that before deleting any file rm should quickly check if path names seem suspicious, and if so, then stop completely. Suspicious can be defined as "a path matches /XXX, i.e. a path starts with / and it's the only forward slash in the path" and "a path matches /usr/XXX, i.e. it starts with /usr/ and has no more forward slashes'': people rarely intend to nuke /bin, /dev, /etc, /usr or /usr/bin, so catching it seems very useful if you/package maintainer makes a typo and it's only slightly annoying for people who actually need to break the file system. As of right now, the default option --preserve-root=all, while preventing `rm /`, doesn't prevent accidental `rm /*`
