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I believe Apple forked rm to provide protection for this case?

Also, if you're willing to lean into npm a bit, there's tools that give a layer of protection over rm such as https://github.com/sindresorhus/trash-cli

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You might be thinking of the GNU version of rm (the version on any modern linux). There you need `rm -rf --no-preserve-root /` to delete everything, which prevents GP's typo (`rm -rf /*` might still work though).

Can confirm /* notation still works. It comes down to how things are interpreted. The shell expands that before rm ever gets argv

Not under Catalina. Don't ask me how I know that.

I just tried it in Big Sur and it wouldn't allow it.

Nah, it totally works. Yall should try it.

I just did it and it seems fi

Did it give you the this is dangerous message or a permissions error? If it’s the latter, you probably got stopped by System Integrity Protection.

You also can't mkdir there either

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