Re:Unix Administration Horror Stories (1993)
by sweetcakes_2600 on Thursday September 03, 2015 @04:03AM
(#10163793)
>Apparently he hit [something else] instead of typing out the [...] directory that he wanted to remove.
This exact reason is why I always and without fail type
rm /some/directory/^A^[[C^[[C -rf
instead of
rm -rf /some/directory/
On creative uses of rm(1) I will never forget my first IT job. I was sitting next to the huge vault door that led to our servers. The boss was in the room next to mine. Small operation of just 4 people and I was 19 years old.
Suddenly the boss comes running past my desk and into the server room, seconds later one of our FreeBSD web servers goes down.
After some panting and insistent question asking I find out that he accidentally ran rm -rf /home &. Apparently he hit the ampersand instead of typing out the users directory that he wanted to remove. So his solution to this was to run to the server and pull the power. :)
Not going to debate on whether his solution was better than killing the pid because we had to recover some user dirs from tapes anyways so it was inevitable.
And before anyone mentions it, yes it had HW RAID with a battery. ;)
Edit: Ok I immediately realized sccs could be source control but the poster in the thread doesn't really make it clear how it affected the system so I wasn't sure.