> Have you ever left your terminal logged in, only to find when you came back to it that a (supposed) friend had typed "rm -rf ~/*" and was hovering over the keyboard with threats along the lines of "lend me a fiver 'til Thursday, or I hit return"?

Wow that is really nasty, the most we did was put confusing backgrounds in, or cronjob a say "xxx is yyy" and have a laugh in the next meeting :)

Obviously you're not a disciple of the BofH ...

https://bofh.bjash.com/bofh/bofh4.html

;)

Related:

Unix Recovery Legend (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25491790 - Dec 2020 (97 comments)

Unix Recovery Legend (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10160417 - Sept 2015 (60 comments)

Unix Recovery Legend (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7892471 - June 2014 (52 comments)

Unix recovery legend - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1212051 - March 2010 (83 comments)

Deja vu all over again

The internet repeats itself

In the dictionary under "redundant" it says, "See Redundant"

Hmm, that seems more apt for "recursion".

For redundant, how about -

Redundant, a.: Redundant

I.e., just "instantiate", don't do a "jmp" and all that kind of stuff, right? :)

>Hmm, that seems more apt for "recursion".

https://www.google.com/search?q=recursion

Well, you can say that again

More like an evergreen. The thing with evergreens is that there will always be someone who will encounter it for the very first time.

And that is perfectly okay.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/

>Deja vu all over again

"I'm a big fan of small utilities."

- That's a quote I made up in imitation of Yogi Berra's quotes, which I'm a fan of.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra

Yup but think of the children

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I wonder whether gnuemacs of the time had the ability to create directories from Emacs lisp.

"echo *" just prints "*" on bash unfortunately.

That's its behaviour in an empty directory, but it works for me on a non-empty directory.

Oh, you're right. Never occurred to me that my home folder would be empty.

I presume you don't have a "modern desktop" installed. Hell, even Firefox spams $HOME with "Downloads".

You're right, it's WSL; so, just dotfiles.

shopt -s dotglob

Yes. Or one lowtech method I use often is `touch ~/-i`. When someone tries to rm -rf * the file called “-i” gets globbed at the front of the arguments and the subsequent command goes into “interactive “ mode meaning it prompts y/n for each file

Nice! Great "bug as a feature" trick!

What version of bash do you see this happening on? Mine works as expected.

I happened to try it in a directory with only dotfiles apparently.

Some doofus did a newfs.