Comment 5 for bug 174283

@Dr Small - I'm suggesting this change would be made in the default profile and bashrc files that ship with the standard Ubuntu release.

This way:

1. novice users are protected by default
2. anyone who really wants to delete / can use --no-preserve-root attribute
3. people who prefer the default behavior can sudo and remove these lines or use .bashrc and .profile to override them

Altering the binary so that it uses –preserve-root as the default choice would work fine too. Anyone wishing to delete / could still do:

rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

Sometimes more typing is a good thing - for example when you are about to wipe your root partition.

@Luciano - note that Sun implemented this very "feature" in Solaris 10:

http://blogs.sun.com/jbeck/date/20041001#rm_rf_protection

I'm not saying we should follow Sun's example, but their choice to implement it shows that many people do think this is an issue.