"wipe" WARNING (it will delete parent files and directories!)

[Adam Warner <lists@consulting.net.nz>]

Package: wipe (0.16-4)
Version: This is wipe version 0.16, Jul  8 2001 by Berke Durak, compiled
Jul  8 2001.

If you wipe hidden directories using the command:

wipe -r .*

once it has finished deleting files down the directory tree it will move
up to the root of your hard disk while continuing to delete everything
(if run as root).

The wildcard .* is matched against the parent directories (..)

I do not consider this to be safe behaviour. In comparison a rm -f -R .*
will only result in:

rm: cannot remove `.' or `..'
rm: cannot remove `.' or `..'

i.e. a rm doesn't touch parent directories and files.

Regards,
Adam Warner

PS: I am extremely fortunate that I only lost program files in /usr :-)
I got to it before it took out my data files.