Also tangentially, if you don't have a sensible backup in place that would protect you from (or at least mitigate) a complete wipe of a single machine (or even all primary ones), you are doing something wrong.
Really, the -f flag should just mean "don't ask for confirmation" and a separate flag should be required to mean something like "yes I do want to nuke my computer". And maybe there should be a flag that means "cross device boundaries", and by default it could refuse to delete anything that has a device number different than the argument it started with. That would at least prevent you from nuking your network-attached storage.
And then someone will come along and bitch that rm isn't safe enough yet again.
Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever used rm to delete across device boundaries. It just doesn't seem like an action you usually want to take.
I don't understand this attitude. Of course software isn't perfect; it's not even close, it's pretty awful. But the best thing about it: it's malleable. When things don't work, you change them to work better.
I'd submit that adding layer upon layer of complexity to prevent all the myriad stupid things people might do using a particular piece of software isn't axiomatically "better".
Maybe if lives depend on its correct function, it's worth it, but that kind of strict requirements gathering and execution is well-understood by the people who live in that world.
Making sure that J. Random DevOps Dude doesn't foot-gun himself when he's paid to know better isn't that.
At my last job, the senior DevOps dude foot-gunned the entire company, by running a read-write disk benchmark (using fio(1)) against the block device (instead of a partition, which, while still stupid, would at least not have been actively destructive) on both my master and all of my slave PostgreSQL hosts. At the same time. And, of course, without telling anyone what he was doing, so the first inkling I had that there was a problem was about 20 minutes later, when I started getting a steadily increasing number of errors suggesting disk corruption.
How does one make such a tool drool-proof enough to prevent that kind of idiocy? Please, help me figure that out. And then give me a time machine, because that was a 16-hour day I'd really rather not have experienced.
And, no, the right move is generally not to fire the jackass who makes that kind of mistake. In my case, above, the company spent about three quarters of a million dollars (just in revenue, never mind how much time was burned in meetings about the incident, my efforts to fix the problem, as well as his and the rest of his team's efforts, and so on) teaching him never to do that again. You don't buy lessons that expensively and then let someone else benefit from them.
(That said, he did get fired several months later for telling the entire engineering lead team to fuck off, in so many words, for their having made a perfectly reasonable request, which was entirely within his responsibilities, and his skills, to satisfy.)
"--one-file-system
when removing a hierarchy recursively, skip any directory that is on a file system different from that of the corresponding command line argument"
When I was in seventh grade, I took an Industrial Arts class ("woodshop"). The first few weeks of the course were spent going over safety of the machinery. In particular, I remember a heavy-handed message that Mr. Hopfer gave at the drill press:
This is a piece of industrial machinery. It is not a toy. If you put your hand on the stage and lower the bit, the machine will not jam up and make funny noises because it is too difficult. Instead, it will drill a hole through your hand. That is what makes it useful. If it didn't do that, you wouldn't be able to cut through wood.
http://www.sawstop.com/why-sawstop/the-technology
Just because people should use something responsibly doesn't mean one shouldn't try to improve its inherent safety.
http://www.amazon.com/SawStop-TSBC-10R2-Cartridge-10-Inch-Bl...
http://www.fairwarning.org/2013/05/after-more-than-a-decade-...
Are you against aircraft collision avoidance too? If your pilot wants to fly into another plane, then the guidance system shouldn't try to stop him, right?
I agree, that's what's so good Unix and GNU-Linux the freedom of root to do anything even major mistakes.