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A comment on Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf. Parent comment

Re:Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he ... by justin66 on Monday November 18, 2024 @09:13AM (#42172423)
Recursively remove everything in the home directory.
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Re:Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he ... by einr on Monday November 18, 2024 @09:26AM (#42172534)
No, that would be ~/* or just ~. The article says that the command deleted every user's home directory, which seems to imply that the shell would expand ~* to a list of every user's home directory. But -- sensibly -- neither modern tcsh, bash, zsh, ksh nor the ancient csh in NeXTStep does that.

csh on NeXTStep 1.0:

  localhost> echo ~
  /me
  localhost> echo ~*
  echo: No match.
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