Ryan McCoskrie <[email protected]> writes: > On Thu, 18 Oct 2012 10:25:09 Steve Holdoway wrote: >> Yup, for the first time EVER ( 29 years of adminstering *nix! ), I've >> seen a server that has been >> >> rm -rf /'d > > I haven't seen it personally, but I have read a story about someone's shell > script periodically deleting $HOME/. (I can't remember why that was desirable) > and then one day having it mistakenly run as root and it was on a machine > where ~root was set to / rather than /root.
Is it any safer in Makefiles? I've seen rm -f a lot, but I can't recall ever seeing a recursive delete. Probably because it's (AFAICT) better practice to remove files *you* put there and then run rmdir on the directory (that should now be empty), so any user-installed files aren't removed. Well, at least for the uninstall target. I suspect rm -rf would be more appropriate for the clean target. —Aidan _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
