It happened to me! I don’t want so to you!

Let’s prevent!

Using safe-rm

On ubuntu:

apt-get install safe-rm

You can see the safe-rm is in /usr/bin/

which safe-rm

As the accident is too grave for us to take any risk, I did move the old rm

mv /usr/bin/rm /usr/bin/rm-old

And create a symlink for safe-rm

ln -s /usr/bin/safe-rm /usr/bin/rm

Note that It can have some side effects, but be on the safe side… If anything should go wrong because of moving the rm out of place you can simply put it back for the moment.

You can edit the safe list at /etc/safe-rm.conf adding your home directory and other precious directories of your choice

safe-rm can also be easily installed on OSX via homebrew

brew install safe-rm

You can config it by creating the file safe-rm.conf at /etc not /usr/local/etc

Finally, (you might need to re-login the shell) removing unwanted directories is now prevented!

Try (at your own risk) :

rm -rf /etc