on Mon, Oct 21, 2002, Russell (rjshaw@iprimus.com.au) wrote:
> dave mallery wrote:
> >
> > hi list!
> >
> > there's a saying that all people are in two groups:
> >
> > those who have done an rm -R * in root
> > and those who have not done it yet.
> >
> > last evening, i joined the former group after six years of linux and a
> > lifetime of computing...
>
> It takes a bit of conditioning of your habits to avoid these kinds of
> errors. I've never been locked out of my car because i *know* that it
> would happen if i didn't always lock the door with the key.
>
> Likewise, when doing a recursive delete of directories as root, always
> do "pwd" or "ls -al" if your path isn't displayed in the prompt.
> Another way is to do the delete from midnight commander where you can
> see everything.
There are a number of other ways to avoid this pitfall.
- I've done rm -rf * from /. I didn't do much harm, as I'd mounted
all but one partition read-only, and was booted into an initrd
image. Bought myself a reboot, but no problems otherwise. That
incident inspired a response to someone who asked if GNU/Linux had
any tools or mechanisms to keep users from doing really stupid
things to themselves. "Yes", I replied, "Bitter experience".
- I'll frequently first chown a tree to a nonprivileged user, then
delete files as that user.
- I'll move files to another tree, then delete that (often as another
user).
- I'll look at the command before I run it. Several times.
- I'll generate a script listing the files to be delted. Look at it
several times. And then run it.
- When performing major system surgery, I have *two* sets of backups
-- generally one local, and one off-system (either tape or network,
depending on circumstances).
Generally: be vewwy vewwy caweful as woot. Back up anything critical
first. And have a recovery path. This doesn't have to be a
full-fledged plan, but it should be at least an idea of what you're
going to do if/when things go wrong.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
ARM Computer: Customer Service Hell On Earth
http://lists.svlug.org/pipermail/svlug/2001-November/038616.html
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