When I saw this node, I wanted to sob like a little baby! I remember the frightful day last year when I was carefully trimming my home directory.

Hmm, junk, junk, rm -rf, unimportant stuff... GAH!! I hear my hard disk churning a little too much and I read the command line back -- to my horror, I'm deleting my ~/pr0n! The worst part is, how was I doing it? It just so happened I typed

rm -rf symlink_to_pr0n/
instead of
rm -rf symlink_to_pr0n
One simple character difference: follow the symlink instead of deleting just the symlink.

This is a warning to those who use tab-completion. Be damned careful of what you're rm -rfing! It might not be that symlink you think you're deleting...

(compare: why I don't use ln -fs anymore...)