Comment by bpchaps

These days, I've been very implicit in how I run rm. To the extent that I don't do rm -rf or rmdir (edit: immediately), but in separate lines as something like:

  pushd dir ; find . -type f -ls | less ; find . -type f -exec rm '{}' \; ; popd ; rm -rf dir

It takes a lot longer to do, but I've seen and made enough mistakes over the years that the forced extra time spent feels necessary. It's worked pretty well so far -- knock knock.