🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <584@celia.UUCP> keith@celia.UUCP (Keith Goldfarb) writes:

   Anyone ever notice that ls uses the '?' character to display
   garbage characters, and the shell takes '?' as a wild card??

   I once worked with someone who did an ls and saw a bunch of
   files that started with "???".  He calmly typed "rm ???*" to
   remove them.

I did this once.  It was the beginning of my second year at
university, and even though I'd been using Bourne shell for a whole
year, I had somehow never encountered the `?'.  It serves me right for
not being inquisitive enough (there was no official teaching of the
shell until the second year, when we were actually taught the
mechanisms used to implement things like pipes, redirection &c.)  Sad
thing was, it was a week's worth of coursework I deleted.  Naturally
they had a backup, so I only lost a day's worth, but at the time, I
was too panicked to think!!!