From: corey@lod.com (Corey Lindsly)
Subject: [TUHS] was turmoil, moving to rm -rf /
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2017 07:19:05 -0700 (PDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20170425141905.8415140FB@lod.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2NNp6eCJZGxZyQcM84aZV4-6UXCj3mQtkqjDQrssPndFQ@mail.gmail.com>
> I had to laugh when I read that because what you don't know is it was part
> of my old Unix wizards test which was left over from a the day when one of
> our hackers (whom I think you would later get to know so I'll not name him)
> accidentally typed: rm -rf . as root from his / on his workstation.
>
> Because /bin/rmdir had been lost, he started getting errors when rmdir was
> forked. So he hit ^C, but he had already lost: /bin, /dev, /etc, /lib,
> most of /usr. He was a developer in the networking group so he was working
> on network code which we could not trust would not panic (in fact we
> disconnected the node from the ethernet immediately just in case). But we
> did have pretty much everything in /usr/bin/[s-z]* -- that is we think it
> was deleting files in /usr/bin when he stopped it.
It was in a situation similar to this that I learned the blessed
usefulness of echo * as a crude substitute for /bin/ls
--corey
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-04-25 14:19 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 26+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-04-24 22:06 [TUHS] There is turmoil in Linux-land - When did rm first avoid going upwards? Noel Chiappa
2017-04-24 22:18 ` Josh Good
2017-04-24 23:23 ` Kurt H Maier
2017-04-24 23:59 ` [TUHS] was turmoil, moving to rm -rf / Larry McVoy
2017-04-25 0:44 ` Dan Cross
2017-04-25 14:02 ` Clem Cole
2017-04-25 14:08 ` Larry McVoy
2017-04-25 14:12 ` Álvaro Jurado
2017-04-25 14:29 ` arnold
2017-04-25 14:31 ` Álvaro Jurado
2017-04-25 16:28 ` Pete Turnbull
2017-04-27 23:44 ` Steve Johnson
2017-04-27 23:54 ` Ron Natalie
2017-04-28 3:04 ` Toby Thain
2017-04-28 5:19 ` arnold
[not found] ` <mailman.198.1493337336.3780.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2017-04-28 14:48 ` John Floren
2017-04-25 14:18 ` Clem Cole
2017-04-25 15:28 ` Dan Cross
2017-04-25 17:56 ` Bakul Shah
2017-04-25 14:19 ` Corey Lindsly [this message]
2017-04-25 0:06 ` [TUHS] There is turmoil in Linux-land - When did rm first avoid going upwards? Ron Natalie
2017-04-25 0:18 ` Kurt H Maier
2017-04-25 0:22 ` ron minnich
2017-04-25 0:24 ` Kurt H Maier
2017-04-25 0:26 ` ron minnich
[not found] <mailman.805.1493129956.3779.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2017-04-25 15:17 ` [TUHS] was turmoil, moving to rm -rf / David
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