I love this post. This sort of thing happens to everyone, most people just are not willing to be so open about it. I was once sshed to the production server, and was cleaning up some old files that got created by an errant script, one which file was '~'. So, to clean it up, I type `rm -rf ~`.
Somewhat similar story from many years ago. Was in ~/somedirectory, wanted to clear the contents, ran `rm -rf *`. Turns out somewhere in between I had done a `cd ..`, but I thought I was still in the child directory. Fastest Ctrl+C ever once I saw some permission errors, but most of the home directory was wiped in that second or two. Didn't have a backup of it unfortunately, though thankfully there wasn't anything to…
fs.delete(shell.expand('*'), recursive:yes)
fs.undo()
or something like that with completion helpers. Our instruments usually lack any safety in general, and making them safe is hard, especially when you're just a worker and not a safety expert. All the world today benefits from mistake-friendly software, except for developers who constantly walk on ui minefields.