Lots of people alias rm to rm -i for the sake of safety. Another
thing that helps is not typing rm -rf ./files and instead typing
rm -rf files. The ./ prefix is easily mistyped, and can lead to any
of the following scenarios:
rm -rf . / filesrm -rf ./ filesrm -rf . /filesrm -rf ./files
The 1st one will wipe your current directory and then try to wipe the whole computer. The next 2 wipe your current directory. Only the last one does what you want.
So why risk it? Don't type ./. It doesn't make the command less
ambiguous anyway.