I agree with this take, don't wanna blame the victim but there's a lesson to be learned.

o.7

That doesn't protect you from typos.

rm -rv /home/schmuck /etc

"Whoops, I accidentally added a space."

I have three ways around this:

1. ls ~/etc ... <press up arrow, replace ls with rm -rv>
2. ls ~/etc ... rm -rv !$
3. Add the commands to a simple script and use variables to remove the danger of a command line.

Just get a cli trash tool and alias it to rm. Arch wiki

instructions on clear, switched to vi mode in bash and cant exit

Amateurs. You all did it accidentally. I deleted system critical files intentionally believing it was beneficial.

I can do one better. A similar 'rm' command but while a Windows disk was mounted read/write. So, 2 OSes damaged in one command.

Is there any reason to use a root account?

if you just borked your /etc and need to rebuild because you don't have sudo anymore

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.

that was my reaction when I saw a coworker put random files and directories into / of a server

I feel like some people don't have a feeling about how a file system works

alias rm=“echo no”

The only backups i have are /etc/nixos/configuration.nix and ~ the rest and die in a fire

To feel the thrill

I accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory