Very Novice user, and coming from a MSDOS background, I habitually logged in as root, even though I had heard dire warnings not to do that.
I had lots of dot-directories in /tmp and my disk didn't have a lot of space left. So I typed in
rm -rf .*
thinking that I was very smart, and would save time by not having to remove each dot-directory separately.
After a while, I wondered why it was taking so long and discovered I had very little of my root filesystem left, so I was forced to do a complete reinstall.
Needless to say, I always do my day-to-day work now as a lowly common user, and NOT as root.
These days, whenever I do a recursive remove, I always include the parent directory name, just to force the habit. "rm -rf ../project/" (or . in your case). Same effect as ./*, but much clearer - to me, anyway.
I had lots of dot-directories in /tmp and my disk didn't have a lot of space left. So I typed in
thinking that I was very smart, and would save time by not having to remove each dot-directory separately.After a while, I wondered why it was taking so long and discovered I had very little of my root filesystem left, so I was forced to do a complete reinstall.
Needless to say, I always do my day-to-day work now as a lowly common user, and NOT as root.