ruediger@ramz.UUCP (Ruediger Helsch) (07/04/90)
In article <1990Jun20.073620.15486@diku.dk> nomann@rimfaxe.diku.dk (Ole Nomann Thomsen) writes: >Recently, I heard about some poor superuser, that tried to delete all of >a users files by cd'ing to the users $HOME and "rm -r *"'ing. This >producede more than the desired result, since his `*' expanded to `.' and >even `..' too. ("Gurfle" to cite the hackers jargon posings). Happened simailarly to me. One evening I was in a hurry removing files on /tmp. I typed "rm -rf *", but a listing showed me that there were some files (beginning with '.') not removed. So i repeated "rm -rf .*". I waited for a response, and after maybe 15 seconds i became suspicious something might go wrong. I aborted with ^C, but too late. I typed "ls", and the answer was "ls: command not found". The /bin directory was already gone. It was going to be a long night.
gary@sci34hub.UUCP (Gary Heston) (07/05/90)
In article <1523@ramz.UUCP> ruediger@ramz.UUCP (Ruediger Helsch) writes: =In article <1990Jun20.073620.15486@diku.dk> nomann@rimfaxe.diku.dk (Ole Nomann Thomsen) writes: =>Recently, I heard about some poor superuser, that tried to delete all of =Happened simailarly to me. One evening I was in a hurry removing files on /tmp. =I typed "rm -rf *", but a listing showed me that there were some files =(beginning with '.') not removed. So i repeated "rm -rf .*". I waited for a =response, and after maybe 15 seconds i became suspicious something might go =wrong. I aborted with ^C, but too late. I typed "ls", and the answer was ="ls: command not found". The /bin directory was already gone. It was going =to be a long night. I have to deal with a lot of leftover files beginning with "...", and have formed the habit (for files beginning with ".") of using ".[a-zA-Z]*" as the argument. I avoid using the -r option if at all possible, using "find . -print | xargs rm" for the files and a second pass to get the directories. Haven't wiped out /bin yet, doing that. Someone else here did a "su -" when he needed to compress some files (owned by root) in a directory, followed by "find . -print | xargs compress"..... compressed /bin, /usr/bin, /etc, and so on real well. Had to boot from tape, put on an uncompressed copy of compress, and clean up.... -- Gary Heston { uunet!sci34hub!gary } System Mismanager SCI Technology, Inc. OEM Products Department (i.e., computers) "The esteemed gentleman says I called him a liar. That's true, and I regret it." Retief, a character created by Keith Laumer.