Tried this on a VM earlier:
http://zombie-slaughter.co.uk/phpbb3/vi ... ?f=7&t=123

Also, the Windows "equivalent":
http://zombie-slaughter.co.uk/phpbb3/vi ... ?f=7&t=124

I was a super noob, although I still consider myself a noob a decade later. I was trying to delete a whole directory and I was trying different commands. I was copy and pasting from a text editor and I accidentally added a space after the /. I knew something was wrong when it took a while to respond and I all of a sudden got file locked errors for some mysql stuff. Luckily there was a backup from the night before.

I've never done the classic rm -rf /, but I have done the following:

in Windows, formatted the wrong partition.

With Norton Ghost, ghosted in the wrong direction. You'd be surprised at how easy this is to do with Ghost, considering the only information it gives you is the drive model and capacity. If they're the same drive type and same drive capacity, you can figure out how that can be a pain...

I've actually done the Ghost thing on a couple of occasions. I got better at backing up my ghost image files after that.

On Solaris I always found that the fmthard command was scary. It overwrites a disk toc in one effortless movement. I dont think there is anything in Linux which is that easy...

If rm -rf ever takes longer the 10ms to come back to the shell prompt I instinctively do a control-c.

Yes (only experimentally). Good thing coreutils was patched at the time.

Well, one time, while logged in as root, I was trying to chown some of the hidden "dot files" in a directory, and did something like "chown -R foo:bar .*", and wondered why it was taking so long... only to discover that everything on the system was getting assigned to that user and group, and it was destroying some of the other permissions, such as the sticky bits. What a nightmare.

Luckily I had the system doing a nightly rsync, and it wasn't hard to write a script to compare permissions and ownerships against the two disks and make corrections.

_________________
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Ed/Bones.

yum remove glibc

After running the above, pretty much nothing works. Commands that might be useful in this situation like yum and rpm and wget no longer function. The error message for any of these commands is "/lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory". Fortunately the install is only a few days old, but it looks like the only possible solution is to start over from scratch.

Here's a classic video of what happens:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWOjmvWPRvQ

I've done that command on sub directories getting excited and tab complete didn't find the right area. Took over a minute before I realized it should be done by now and I screwed up.

I also did this with a chmod command when I was new. I was mostly upset with the system and did 'chmod -R 777 /' to stop getting permission errors. I wiped the machine after that didn't even stop the message.

Anyone ran "find / -delete" ? I luckily read about them before someone told me to run that kind of commands as a bad joke.

The closest I've ever come was when I set the immutable bit on every file on my filesystem, because from a backup script I invoked a subshell that ran



but forgot to export $BACKUP_DIR, so in the subshell it evaluated to the empty string.

Oppsss wrong cast...
I thought its rm -rf, but then I noticed its rm -rf / (nevr ran this one).
I am using rm- rf /path/ when I have to delete a certain directory with subfolders.

Me too - decommisioning an old server

It was quite an anti-climax and boring actually. The system keeps running, but you just can't do a whole lot with it.

For that, I prefer 'cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda' myself

*adds that to the bucket list*

I haven't done it myself, but I have an "rm -rf" related story to tell.

Back in 1992 I got my first programming job in University. It was writing perl scripts to generate reports from the logs of the various server systems that ran on campus (this was at CMU and back then they had a distributed computing system called "Andrew" that ran on various Unix systems). I was given root access to a variety of servers so that I could install and run scripts with access to the logs.

After my very first day on the job I had a hardware lab as part of a digital design class I was taking. I had a friend who was a lab partner with me and I thought I was so cool because I had root on some of the campus' most important servers. So I went over to a VT100 terminal in the lab (those were the days!) and said "watch this". I proceeded to telnet to one of the servers (those were the days!) and log in as root. I thought my friend would be impressed. He immediately threw his hands to the keyboard and typed "rm -rf /". I think he meant it only as a joke and didn't meant to press enter. But I think that the muscle memory of hitting enter after every command, combined with the fact that I jostled him as I tried to push him away from the keyboard once I saw what he had typed, caused him to actually press enter.

I hit Ctrl-C as quickly as I could but ... the damage was done. Files had been removed.

I was so afraid that I was going to lose my job over this mistake. I was embarrassed and contacted my boss immediately to let him know what happened. Thankfully, he was very understanding and managed to recover the lost files from a similar system that was running elsewhere in the hardware lab.

And I didn't lose my job. I felt very lucky and relieved and believe me, I never made a mistake like that again! I have always treated a root shell with alot of respect ever since.