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.
I don't know if it should be a bad thing. Inside the tar archive the configs were already organized into their respective dirctories, this way with --preserve-permissions --overwrite I could just quickly add the desired versions of configs.
Some examples of contents:
-rw-r--r-- root/root 2201 2026-02-18 08:08 etc/pam.d/sshd
-rw-r--r-- root/root 399 2026-02-17 23:22 etc/pam.d/sudo
-rw-r--r-- root/root 2208 2026-02-18 09:13 etc/sysctl.conf
drwx------ user/user 0 2026-02-17 23:28 home/user/.ssh/
-rw------- user/user 205 2026-02-17 23:29 home/user/.ssh/authorized_keys
drwxrwxr-x user/user 0 2026-02-18 16:30 home/user/.vnc/
-rw-rw-r-- user/user 85 2026-02-18 15:32 home/user/.vnc/tigervnc.conf
-rw-r--r-- root/root 3553 2026-02-18 08:04 etc/ssh/sshd_config
Keeps permissions, keeps ownership, puts things where they belong (or copies from where they were), and you end up with a single file that can be stored on whatever filesystem.