And that is why alias rm='rm -I' was invented.
Quoting Roy Tennant <[email protected]>:
I agree. I've done serious damage to my own server this way. Anyone
who knows me knows that I'm completely capable of this. Unlike
others, who are both more intelligent and more cautious. Down the
path of the wild carded, recursive delete command lies DANGER. Having
a little bit of knowledge is more dangerous, in most cases, than none
at all. In Unix and in whitewater rafting.
Roy
On Oct 28, 2014, at 6:46 PM, Cary Gordon <[email protected]> wrote:
Well you can do a lot of damage quickly using very short commands. Deleting
the master boot record can be quite effective, but I will demure from
giving specific examples.
On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 3:22 PM, Stuart Yeates <[email protected]>
wrote:
-- Because you can delete everything on the system with a very short
command.
This is actually a misconception.
The very short command doesn't delete everything on the system. The
integrity of files which are currently open (including things like the
kernel image, executable files for currently-running programs, etc) is
protected until they are closed (or the next reboot, whichever is first).
These files vanish from the directory structure on the filesystem but can
still be accessed by interacting with the running processes which have them
open (or /proc/ for the very desperate).
This is the POSIX alternative to the windows "That file is currently in
use" scenario and explains why, when a runaway log file fills up a disk,
you have to both delete the log file and restart the service to get the
disk back.
cheers
stuart
--
Cary Gordon
The Cherry Hill Company
http://chillco.com
