Long ago when I was, I think, a sophomore in college and worked for the university IT group, I was trying to add an external drive to an early NeXT machine [1]. I wanted to try out their fancy GUI development stuff, you see. I was at best a modestly competent Unix admin, and this was circa NextStep 1.0, so the OS was... rough. It was in the dark days of SCSI terminators, so just telling if the drive was properly conn…
root shell, plus rm with any sort of wildcard matching, plus a bit too much of a delay before you get your shell prompt back results in a very specific kind of panicked anxiety that almost anyone who has been programming or sysadmining for a while can easily relate to.
alias rm="rm -v" helps.