Re: scripting question
On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, Antony Gelberg wrote:
- several dozen/hundred ways to skin this cat ..
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Scott Henson" <debian-list@silvercoin.dyndns.org>
> To: <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 2:13 AM
> Subject: Re: scripting question
>
>
> > On Tue, 2003-04-15 at 20:40, nate wrote:
> > > rm -rf *
...
> > happened cause yours will be hosed. This command will generally delete
> > your entire file system.
only if you didn't do the proper testing first
> Well generally it depends what directory you execute it from. But I agree
> that it is a risky policy.
one learns(best) and remembers(forever) when things are done the hard
way ...
you're not a tried and true sysadmin till you've recovered from an
inadvertant equivalent of "rm -rf *" in the wrong directory :-)
> FWIW, I thought of rm -rf `ls |grep -v ?B?` but didn't know the regexp for
> start and end of word (the ?'s)...
start and end ... ^B$ or /B/ is easier... no need to get too fancy
but it assumes certain directory for ^B$ to work as expected
which may or may not be what you really wanted
the more ` * & $ ' \ one uses, the more likely it is that a simple
process/proceedure will get inadvertantly forgotten and you've got a mess
for testing your backup methodologies in a "raging fire situation"
-- in a script ... always check the success or failure of mv and cp before
doing rm -f of anything ... and test it on sample directory trees
/path/to.testing.only/{a,b,c,d/d1,d/d2,d/d3}
-- test your scripts .. before using it on a live system ...
-- and be careful, that what you type on a command line will NOT
necessarily work in a bash script
root# ls -la /home/foo | grep -iv "ignore|this|and|that"
will need to be 'escaped' in some scripts and not others
c ya
alvin
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