Am Mittwoch, 14. September 2011 schrieb Andrew Reid: > > On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:00 PM, Bob Proulx <b...@proulx.com> wrote: > > > jacques wrote: > > >> by error most of the binaries in /usr are erased (killing rm :-( > > > > > > Everyone has made that mistake at some point. I know I have! > > > > Not me! Though I did chmod -R /usr once. I noticed it immediately > > and cancelled. Most of the commands were broken, though luckily tar > > and scp still worked, so I copied over a backup and untarred it. > > This anecdote is brought up whenever anyone suggests skipping /usr > > /bin in backups is a good idea because the data doesn't change and > > would be recovered by OS reinstall anyway (yes I've heard that > > argument). > > > > Which brings me to another fun question. What's your worst > > administration mistake and how did you recover? > > I once tried to change the ownership of all the files in a user > directory by doing something like "chown -R <newuser> .*" from within > the directory -- I've forgotten what exactly I typed, but my motive was > to get all the "." files included in the scope of the command. > > Unfortunately, ".*" includes "..", so the chown command hopped > up to /home, and started switching the whole file system over > to be owned by the new user. > > I caught it after it was taking a suspiciously long time, and > after a minute or two, I figured out what had happened.
In my Linux/UNIX basics training I have a slide about exactly that. And another one about escaping. Consider rm * and rm "*". Or mkdir "A directory with space" versus mkdir A directory with spaces. And a recommendation to put echo in front of the command if unsure what the shell does make out of the command line. Cause I think I do not need to let my course participants run into data loss experiences. And yes, I did rm -rf .* once ;). -- Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201109140954.02316.mar...@lichtvoll.de