Recently I have committed a big mistake: I rm my home directory. One good aspect of this bad situation is that I have backed up the code directory with borg. However, my hexo personal blog is not in the list. To make matters worse, most posts of this blog were stored locally.
The mess is attributed to a simple command: rm. Although rm are usually treated as a source of memes at which even newbies would smile knowingly, this worst case happened to me. Here is the command which cause a disaster: rm -rf * '/home/<user_name>/.local/share/Trash/files'.
Well, I thought I specified a folder to delete everything(*) in the absolute path(path in the single quote) and expected so. But my home directory was empty after that.
There is an another joke when we talk about rm: You should install adobe series in your filesystem because it would hold its own against rm for a while when you delete your / root stupidly.
So the conclusion is that you need to rm files in the current working directory. If not, be aware of *, like the path you specify in the single quote, is part of argument to tell rm to delete files. So the command should be rm -rf '/home/<user_name>/.local/share/Trash/files/*'. I learned this lesson the hard way, and hope you never encounter this kind of issue.
With hindsight, I think I ought to back up files on a regular basis.
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