Questions[rm](ubuntu)

After committing the infamous mistake of deleting my entire file system via sudo rm -rf /*, recovering from the horrendous damage that I had done and coping with the fact that I just lost 6 years off my lifespan, I started wondering why is it even possible to do that, and what could be done to prevent this mistake from happening.

One solution that was suggested to me is revoking root access from my account, but that is inconvenient, because a lot of commands require root access and when you have to run a few dozen commands every day, that gets annoying.

Backing up your system is the obvious way to go. But restoring a backup also requires some downtime, and depending on your system that downtime could be days or weeks, which could be unacceptable in some cases.

My question is: Why not implement a confirmation when the user tries to delete their filesystem? So that when you actually want to do that, you just hit Y or enter, and if you don't at least you don't lose everything.

Something I feel I ought to know for sure: if I ls <something>, will rm <something> remove exactly the same files that ls displayed? Are there any circumstances where rm could remove files that ls did not show? (This is in the 18.04 bash)

Edit: thank you to everyone who answered. I think the full answer is a combination of all the answers, so I have accepted the most up-voted answer as "the answer".

Unexpected things I have learned along the way:

• ls is not as straightforward as you might think in its handling of its arguments
• In a simple un-fiddled-with installation of Ubuntu, .bashrc aliases ls
• Don't name your files beginning with a dash as they can look like command arguments, and naming one -r is asking for it!

I am trying to remove a png image that was uploaded to my server via a PHP script. Whenever I try to delete it both through ftp and terminal, I get the error

No such file or directory

However, when I ls in the dir, the file is listed and it is also listed in my ftp client. I have tried creating a file with the same name and I end up getting two files with the same name.

I can open the file that supposedly does not exist, but I still can't remove it. I have also tried rebooting my server. Any ideas what may be the issue? I am running a 64 bit version of Ubuntu, but I don't think its a 32/64 bit issue. I should also note I have removed many other png files uploaded by the same PHP script.

Output for ls -l

total 224 
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 222838 May 13 04:14 qyxdshyikfr_fishing_timeout.png 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 272 May 14 06:54 upload.php

Output when trying to rm

rm: cannot remove ‘qyxdshyikfr_fishing_timeout.png’: No such file or directory

upload.php: http://pastebin.com/z87eypTY

I have a folder that has many files and "rm -rf" takes a lot of time to complete. Is there any faster way to remove a directory and it's contents (subdirs, etc)?

Is it possible to restore files/directories which are deleted from terminal using rm and rm -r?. If a file is deleted from graphical interface, it could be restored from trash, but how do you restore a file if it is removed using the rm utility?.