This has nothing to do with the OP, but I always rehearse my deletions with "ls -d", and after seeing the output hit the up arrow in my command history and replace it with the rm command I wanted to attempt. I also never use -r without intention - a lot of people use it habitually even when not deleting a directory. Lastly, I never -f, I just chmod first.
This is why I never use rm when I'm tired or working on important system anymore. I'll just mv the files somewhere for review later. Worst case is I just moved a wrong file and can simply restore it back.
After an allnighter, which isn't easy for me anymore, I typed:
``rm -rf. /*``
with the dot and the space reversed.
When the shell threw an error in my face, I thought, "oh, an extra dot." so I deleted the dot and re-run the command.
And there goes my configs and most of the dotfiles in my home dir. Luckily, I have backup for some of those, so it wasn't a complete disaster.
I don't trust myself doing ``rm`` in commandline anymore.