Rosemary McGillicuddy wrote:
Duncan Anderson wrote:
Rosemary McGillicuddy wrote:
The CLI is not something to be feared.
cheers
Duncan
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Is that not so ? I read somewhere about a command that could wipe
out your whole system if done as root. Something to do with r and rm
and -r I think ...
Rosemary
PS Not that I am about to do anything so outrageous :-)
Ha! That reminds me. Once upon a time I used to run a UNIX support
department for a big distributor, and we had our own public access ftp
server with patches and drivers on it. Anyway, one fine day, I was
logged in as "root", fiddling around in a subdirectory, and then I
typed "cd", and <enter>, and then someone must have distracted me, and
then I typed "rm *" and pressed <enter>.
Since this was an old UNIX box, "cd" on its own takes you to the "/"
directory. "root" does not have its own home as on Linux.
OOPS!
Not only did that UNIX box not have its own /root home directory, but
it also lacked a separate /boot or /stand directory, so I had just
managed to remove the kernel "/unix" and the boot program "/boot".
DOUBLE OOPS!
Fortunately, I kept my wits about me, and quickly mounted an
installation boot floppy from which I copied the "/boot" program, then
I relinked the kernel, which produced a new "/unix" file, while
praying that we did not have a power failure.
Phew! None of my support technicians noticed a thing! I reckon I would
have been a bit embarrassed if they had.
Incidentally, the command you were talking about "rm -r" is absolutely
lethal when run as "root" in the root directory.
cheers
Duncan
Glad you were able to retrieve the situation -:-) must have been a bit
of a sweat for a while.
Read that in a book I have somewhere ... ever since been nervous in CLI!
cheers
Rosemary
PS Actually have realised I can move about and look quite safely, and
even do so as root sometimes ....
There are some added protections to make doing that even harder now.
When you type "rm" from the command line, you are actualy running "rm
-i" thanks to a handy alias. So you would be asked to confirm every
deletion. When you get asked about the first one, hit Ctrl-c, and it
will abort the command. Not that you want to be logged in as root,
unless you realy need to for what you are doing. But it is harder to
break things then it used to be. There are still a lot of things you can
do as root that will break the system.
Mikkel
--
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for you are crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
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