My first thought on reading the headline was "what Linux still did that in 2015"? I thought I read somewhere years ago that Sun, BSD and GNU rm all had checks in them to spot the / or /* and refuse to run. According to this SE page[1] GNU even has an option to tell rm "no I really do want to blow away my whole root" by using "--no-preserve-root".<p>Apparently the "fix" only applies to the root user. The article is about a regular user who recursively lost everything he owned starting at /.<p>Ouch!<p>[1] <a href="https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/19547/how-far-can-you-go-with-rm-rf-as-root" rel="nofollow">https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/19547/how-far-can-y...</a>
The real problem here is that a multi-hundred-line script was written in bash. While bugs can happen in any language, this particular error was due to a bash-specific pitfall, and bash has <i>many</i> such pitfalls. Bash is really only suitable for interactive use, or for bootstrapping the install of another scripting language.