worst Linux moment

[Peter Hiscocks]

On our first Unix system in the EE department at Ryerson, one of our profs
executed some variant of rm -rf * and wondered why the command was taking so
long to execute, until it announced:

	rm	command not found

or something equivalent. That was the point where the rm command had been
deleted.

And at one point I managed to flatten the entire directory structure so that
all my files - thousands of them - ended up in my home directory.
Fortunately, our systems guys were able to reverse that one.

Peter

On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 03:36:19PM -0400, James Knott wrote:
> Noah John Gellner wrote:
> > When I first started using Linux I had no background in Unix. I used to
> > mount my windows 3.x partition to allow easy sharing of files. For some
> > reason or other I decided to 'uninstall' Slackware and so su'ed, cd'ed
> > to / and executed rm -rf *. My linux partition was only around 60 megs
> > so I couldn't figure out why the command was taking so long to execute.
> > I soon gained a deeper conceptual understanding of mounted filesystems.
> > 
> > The unnuanced suggestion on the deleting CVS ... thread made me recall
> > this sorry tale.
> > 
> 
> 
> Oh well...  It was only a Windows system.  No loss.  ;-)
> 
> --
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-- 
Peter D. Hiscocks                         	   
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering    
Ryerson University,                    
350 Victoria Street,
Toronto, Ontario, M5B 2K3, Canada

Phone:   (416) 979-5000 Ext 6109
Fax:     (416) 979-5280
Email:   phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org
URL:     http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~phiscock
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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