Hello coreutils maintainers,

I noticed a potentially dangerous difference in how rm handles the / and /* patterns.

Currently:

$ sudo rm -rf /
rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'
rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe

This prevents accidental deletion of the root directory.

However:

$ sudo rm -rf /*

This command will proceed to remove the contents of /, effectively destroying the system, without any warning.

While this is technically correct according to shell expansion rules, it may be surprising for some users. People might assume /* is just as protected as /, but the safeguard doesn’t apply.

P.S.: I removed root(