Comment by jedisct1

My good old trick to mitigate that is:

    touch /-@

I also always do it in my home directory:

    touch ~/-@

That's the first thing I do on a new host.

When accidentally running rm -f *, the command expands to -@ first, which is not a valid option and makes the command fail before doing any harm

    rm: illegal option -- @
    usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dPRrvW] file ...