I imagine that someone wanted someone's head, so whose head should it have been? They guy who wrote the system couldn't be fired, he was in a different company. And maybe a macro has been assigned to that key, so it wasn't his fault anyway.

Unfortunately, most small companies have no-one who fills that role, or if they do, it's the same person who both has the power to fire others, and is unwilling to entertain the notion that they themselves are at fault.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Apr 27 17:02 cc -> /etc/alternatives/cc

Guess what happens when you paste a whole list of those into a console as root?

To prevent this from happening with me, I've added the following line to my `.Xdefaults`

    URxvt.perl-ext: confirm-paste

http://i.imgur.com/joHRXaH.png

For example:

  $ echo "asdf" > foo
  $ cat foo
  asdf
  $ lrwxwrwxrwx 1 root root -> foo
  lrwxrwxrwx: command not found
  $ cat foo
  $

Out of curiosity, what was the solution to fix all that?

And even if you don't buy that, if pushing the button's not a big deal it doesn't need all the safeguards everyone's yelling for. (Had such safeguards been in place he might equally well have seen them, thought "oh, nobody's in, this will do what I want anyway" and approved it).

And given that it's right next to a 'single terminal reset' key, it should be immediately obvious to anyone who's ever used a keyboard - mistakes can and do happen, even when you're fluent.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821

The first thing I do on a new Firefox installation is enable "Restore all tabs on startup".

Far from perfect - it depended on the order of deletion - but a more general solution than preserve root. Of course it still requires the user to mark things they consider "important".

The command "rm -rf ~/blue/" is just a single space key from being equivalent to "rm -rf /" with "rm -rf ~/blue /"

"rm -rf ~/blue /" will not come close to deleting / unless you are in the habit of running every command as sudo, even ignoring the presence of --no-preserve-root

    $ cd dir where there are source files and temp files
    $ rm *.tmp # or so you think
    '.tmp not found'
    # too bad

1. You type it into the wrong system (D'oh)

2. You have run `mount --bind / /somewhere/else` then `rm -rf /somewhere` a week later

:(

Every few days I remind myself of this.... then I have to delete another directory with a git repository in it, and end up add the -f in again

    rmgit()
    {
        git status
        read -p "Are you sure? " -n 1 -r
        echo
        if [[ $REPLY =~ ^[Yy]$ ]]
        then
            rm .git -rf
        fi
    }

    rmrf()
    {
        (echo "The following files are going to be deleted!!!"
         for FILE in "$@"; do
             echo "<<<" "$FILE" ">>>"
         done) | less
        read -p "Are you sure? " -n 1 -r
        echo
        if [[ $REPLY =~ ^[Yy]$ ]]
        then
            rm -rf "$@"
        fi
    }

Premature enter just results in:

[web@server /]$ rm ~

rm: cannot remove `/home/web': Is a directory

Such as this classic:

https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commi...

so of course, I said "I'll just uninstall it from there and install it in the correct folder" and it proceeded to delete C:/Program Files/

http://www.rpgfan.com/news/2001/1416.html

Uninstall wipes out your Windows directory.

    $ cp -r path/to/some/directory path/to/very/important/directory
    $ (run some commands to verify copy did what I wanted)
    $ rm -r path/to/some/directory path/to/very/important/directory

Fortunately, despite rm's poor choice of options and bash's poor default handling of variable name typos and the obvious PEBKAC, backups saved the day here.

People are human. Policy ought to reflect this.

rm -rf *

in their shell history? Now it's just one accidental twitch away.

It is definitely a problem with Unix also.

I'm trying to say that when you've got something dangerous without safeguards, you take care around it. Not taking care of known-dangerous things and causing severe damages as a result is an arguably good case for dismissal.

And, of course, that should've been the solution to OP's incident with the Korean Airlines flight 007. Backups, surprisingly, are scarcely mentioned at all in this whole thread.

you cannot fat finger rm -rf /

  # rm -rf /tmp/bla

  # rm -rf / tmp/bla

I was enlisted in the Marines, MOS as a programmer (4063), 1989 - 1993. I never really programmed, but spend my time as a small computer support guy.

Computer games were officially forbidden, but unofficially tolerated, provided one was discrete. I suspect the same 'don't ask don't tell' policy applied to EUCE at the embassy in question.

Sea story. My team was once directed by our boss, the Major, to 'sweep' the command for 'games' and remove them from computers. This took the better part of two weeks, and was massively unpopular with our peers. 'A Marine On Duty Has No Friends', we repeated to ourselves. We even got into the spirit of things and deleted games from _our_ computers.

Near the end of this evolution I hand-carried some paper into my Major's office. He was, yes, playing a computer game.

He did at least have the grace to look embarrassed.