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Re: scripting question



On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 09:31, Bill Moseley wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, Russ Pitman wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 09:13:41PM -0400, Scott Henson wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2003-04-15 at 20:40, nate wrote:
> > > > rm -rf *
> > > Do me a favor.  Try this on your system as root.  Then walk a way and
> > > come back an hour later.  Youll need another system to tell us what
> > > happened cause yours will be hosed.  This command will generally delete
> > > your entire file system.  Trust me, Ive done a form of it before(mv *).
> > > 
> > > -- 
> > > Scott Henson <debian-list@silvercoin.dyndns.org>
> > > 
> > 
> > Every sysadmin is entitled to do this or the eqivalent just ONCE.
> 
> The one I did yesterday (and have done before which breaks the ONCE rule)
> is rm -rf foo * where I meant rm -rf foo*  (foo was a tarball that I
> unpacked so I did have two foo* to remove.  At least this time it was not
> in a top-level directory.
> 
> -- 
> Bill Moseley moseley@hank.org

My closest was an ext2 partition of 24 GB that had been hopping in and
out of "virtually full" - I'd burned off a CD of stuff and cleared up
just that, shutdown, started back up with the /home partition unmounted,
and defragged it while I puttered in another VC with system maintenance
work on the other partitions and a few services. Guess who BADLY hung
the system, resulting in about 6 GB outside of /home/lost+found, 12 GB
of fragments in /home/lost+found, and 5 GB just totally gone.

The defragging actually was needed - the system reported that the
partition was over 50% fragmented and anything over a sector in size was
noticeably involving thrashing to read. It just didn't need *THAT*.
-- 
Mark L. Kahnt, FLMI/M, ALHC, HIA, AIAA, ACS, MHP
ML Kahnt New Markets Consulting
Tel: (613) 531-8684 / (613) 539-0935
Email: kahnt@hosehead.dyndns.org

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