Geeky Not So Fun: I Did It.
I am now an official memberr of the Linux-weenie society. You don’t hear much about the Linux-weenie society, but most (if not all) Linux users are secret members. How did I get inducted?
When I attempted to delete a *.bak file in my awstats directory I typed this:
rm * .bak
See the space? Yes. It took the entire directory.
Thankfully, I had almost the exact same setup on another server so I was able to grab my awstats conf files from there and tweak ‘em, but holy…that could have just as easily been any other directory on the machine. And yes, I was root.
Weenies Unite!
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POSTED IN: Geeky Fun
6 opinions for Geeky Not So Fun: I Did It.
Ganesh
Jul 17, 2006 at 10:37 pm
I did a similar thing only to sit and repent my few moments of indescretion…after sitting and debugging some 40 odd php scripts of mine, i wanted to delete all the backup files (*.php~) but i ended up doing rm *.php* :( i still regret those 2 seconds of madness..
Jon
Jul 18, 2006 at 5:37 am
Ouch…nasty.
Linux is meeeaan!!
nixcraft
Jul 18, 2006 at 11:29 am
Put followig alias in your ~/.bash_profile
alias cp=’cp -i’
alias mv=’mv -i’
alias rm=’rm -i’
Never ever use rm -rf command ;)
Foo
Jul 18, 2006 at 1:25 pm
Ah, I did something like that once in my desktop directory (which was serving as my temporary “dump space” for new stuff). Fortunately, after calming down and taking a deep breath, I realized that I had (luckily) forgotten the -r switch… and I had another terminal window open, in which I had recently ls’d the directory.
Jon
Jul 20, 2006 at 6:12 pm
You guys are way too smart for me :)
Foo - I’m unclear how having the most recent file listing helped in your case?
Ben
Jul 28, 2006 at 4:25 am
I’ve done the same thing before, deleted the entire contents of /etc. Despite this it still booted OK (god bless Slackware) and I was able to salvage the good bits from it … I had to rebuild the OS eventually though! There is something to be said for working in KDE and moving items to the waste bin!
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