22 Welcome, New User!
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 90 15:51 CST
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: rm *
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computersI too have had a similar disaster using rm. Once I was removing a file
system from my disk which was something like /usr/foo/bin. I was in /
usr/foo and had removed several parts of the system by:% rm -r ./etc
% rm -r ./adm...and so on. But when it came time to do ./bin, I missed the period.
System didn’t like that too much.Unix wasn’t designed to live after the mortal blow of losing its /bin direc-
tory. An intelligent operating system would have given the user a chance to
recover (or at least confirm whether he really wanted to render the operat-
ing system inoperable).Unix aficionados accept occasional file deletion as normal. For example,
consider following excerpt from the comp.unix.questions FAQ :^3
6) How do I “undelete” a file?Someday, you are going to accidentally type something like:% rm * .fooand find you just deleted “*” instead of “*.foo”. Consider it a
rite of passage.Of course, any decent systems administrator should be doing
regular backups. Check with your sysadmin to see if a recent
backup copy of your file is available.“A rite of passage”? In no other industry could a manufacturer take such a
cavalier attitude toward a faulty product. “But your honor, the exploding
gas tank was just a rite of passage.” “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we
will prove that the damage caused by the failure of the safety catch on our(^3) comp.unix.questions is an international bulletin-board where users new to the
Unix Gulag ask questions of others who have been there so long that they don’t
know of any other world. The FAQ is a list of Frequently Asked Questions gar-
nered from the reports of the multitudes shooting themselves in the feet.