monline

By default (at least in Ubuntu 9.04) if you use the .* wildcard in Bash, it will match the . and .. entries as well. I've seen not just once users executing this in a directory:
Their intention was to remove all entries in the current directory. However since the default shell is bash and by default the .* matches .. too, the command will traverse up in the directory tree ... at least as far as it can go with the user's privileges.

I found this while looking for a solution on how to transfer files with names containing accented characters from my Mac to a Win box. Here's another post with tips for some bugs.