monline

I don't know about earlier releases, but ICS has a bash shell in /system/bin. If you start a shell through ADB (eg. ./adb shell), it'll start /system/bin/sh as a shell which is a symlink to bash. Unfortunately ADB does not add the -l option to the shell's commandline, thus the shell will not be a login shell and it'll not look for _any_ configuration files.

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.