I'm just curious as to who has made this classic admin mistake before.

Me personally, I haven't done that, but some years ago I once did a "mv * root" while in the root directory. That moved *everything* into the root user's home directory. At that point my system was completely hosed, because trying to run ls would throw errors about not being able to load the libc libraries out of the (now moved) /lib directory.

It was a fresh install, and this was back in the days when Linux rescue boot disks didn't really exist (mid-90s), so I ended up just reinstalling.

In my early linux type days, before i learnt to MAN everything that was suggested to me.. I was in a help channel trying to stop RM prompting me to y/n every file..

Someone jokily said Alias rm='rm -rf /' and me in my new egerness to try did it.. Consiquently my system went down pretty quickly.. Learnt that lesson

_________________
ServerAdmin - www.our-lan.com
"Diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy whilst looking for a really big stick"
"In my experiece, any attempt to make any system idiot proof will only challenge God to make a better idiot"

The worst I've done is in my homedir, a

rm -rf * php

Yeah. That sucked.

_________________
Jay Faulkner
http://oldos.org

"rm -rf /" is a standard command to run at the end of a training course; let's see how well the OS will kill itself

Solaris does pretty well. HP/UX 10.20 would refuse to delete lots of stuff. Windows XP equivalent would barf pretty quickly.

_________________
Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

Hmmm... I'm actually considering setting up a virtual machine with Linux and run that command, just to see how things grind to a halt.

I'd love to see a video of that.

That reminds me, I once tried doing a kill -9 1 (the init process) to see what would happen. Turns out init is apparently resistant to all signals. Heh.

I rdiffed backwards once. That was a mess. Ended up having to boot Finnix and fix stuff.

I never ran 'rm -rf /' by accident but have done it intentionally.

My worst screw up was when my default PXE config was to run a tools menu with the default being a DBAN autonuke session. I was testing some new systems and didn't realize they were set to boot first over the network and ended up destroying them before I even realized it was happening. I wept quietly in the corner for a few minutes. It all worked out well though as it gave me a chance to do it again and to do it better.

For the record, I still have DBAN autonuke set as my default PXE profile because I never did get around to changing it.

IIRC, back on "Slackware 95", i was trying to rm a local dir. It must have been usr or lib. Out of habit i hit the solidus first and hosed my system. Almost as bad as when i tried upgrading from libc5 to libc 6 manually.

I've done rm -rf ./* while thinking I was in a particular directory but painfully realizing I was in the wrong one. It has never been the root dir yet though.

A friend of mine just learned about file permissions and did a "chmod 000 /* -R" to secure his system. "It took a while to finish, and then I got loads of error messages when trying to do anything. How do I restore the previous permissions?" .

Actually, it's not too hard to fix that, at least on most systems. Don't know about your 90's vintage system.

Just do (for example):

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/root/lib /root/lib/ld-linux.so.2 /root/bin/mv /root/* /

Basically, you just have to tell it explicitly where everything is, since none of it is where it's supposed to be.

I did that once. Intentionally, as I was about to decommission a VPS from a different hosting company. It was actually rather anti-climactic. I did remember to do rm -rfv / so that I could watch its progress! After a while I got back to the shell prompt, and of course I couldn't run any commands. I don't know though,

-bash: ls: command not found

wasn't as exciting as I had hoped. I was kinda expecting to see sparks or something.

I don't know about sparks, but if you cat /vmlinux to /dev/audio, you'll hear the voice of God!

This is a glibc feature and thus present on most Linux systems which use glibc. Other operating systems may not (probably don't) have this functionality.

_________________
Rgds

Stephen

(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

friend of mine did this by accident on his old slackware box at his house one day years ago (2000ish?)

He had qmail running and was cleaning out some directories for the queues....

he was a noob to scripting then so he was doing rm -rf a/ (enter) rm -rf b/ (enter)


eventually it came to rm -rf / d (enter)

took a few seconds.. he stared at it

"NOOOO!" *SLAM CONTROL C*

deleted everything up to /dev then stopped.

he sighed, saw his home directories etc were safe and went to go reinstall everything else.

"shutdown -r now"

but because passwd was gone, uid 0 didnt exist anymore. Linux had and has some very interesting error messages

told him and i shit you not "You do not exist here. Go away."