I accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.
I went on to rm -rv ~/etc, but I quickly typed rm -rv /etc instead, and hit enter, while using a root account.


The biggest flaw with cars is when they crash. When I crash my car due to user error, because I made a small mistake, this proves that cars are dangerous. Some other vehicles like planes get around this by only allowing trusted users to do dangerous actions, why can’t cars be more like planes? /s
Always backup important data, always have the ability to restore your backups. If rm doesn’t get it, ransomware or a bad/old drive will.
A sysadmin deleting /bin is annoying, but it shouldn’t take them more than a few mins to get a fresh copy from a backup or a donor machine. Or to just be more careful instead.