Re: [Nolug] Nine traits of the veteran Unix admin

On 8/6/13, Philip Amadeo Saeli <psaeli@zorodyne.com> wrote:
> * Me <pmheart6@yahoo.com> [2013-08-06 16:09:21 -0700]:
>> Is this a trait....
>> You can tell a story of typing
>> rm -rf /
>> At 2 am. (Or some other time)
> In my experience, it's more like:
> rm -rf something- *

A week after I finished setting up my very first Slackware system,
I tried to setup swap with "mkswap /dev/hda1"; shortly after
spending over 24 hours compiling the kernel on a 33mhz with 8MB of
RAM; bye bye root filesystem.

Back to running the installer and feeding 100 floppy disks to the
computer from the Base, N and D disk sets all over again....

Then back in 1996 or so, I managed to typo a mv script in some
manner, that _every_ file on the filesystem was getting moved
to "/".

For safety's sake I got in the habit of intentionally never using
wildcards with rm when using -rf. I prefer

find subdir -name 'something-*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Spend the extra time it takes to type that, thinking carefully about
what you're doing.

--
-JH
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