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Ooops.

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Re: Ooops.

#41

Post by statictype »

arethuza wrote: post #37
stephen_g wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just tell them it's the same as a Windows installer accidentally removing the entire Program Files directory.

I knew someone who, in the days of Windows 3.1, managed to accidentally invoke "format c:" from inside Microsoft Word - I was in the same room as them when they did it and heard the cries for help. What they couldn't do was explain to me what they had done to accompish such a feat.

As Windows was probably installed on C it probably didn't do any real damage, did it?

Re: Ooops.

#42

Post by maweaver »

JonnieCache wrote: post #18

While we're on the subject, has anyone successfully found/created a replacement for rm on OS X that moves files to the trash, but doesn't break the interface of rm for use in scripts?

I use trash-cli (http://code.google.com/p/trash-cli/) on Linux, it is in Python so it shouldn't be too hard to get running on OS X (although I guess you might have to modify the location of the trash folder)

Re: Ooops.

#44

Post by shrikant »

Perhaps because I'm not a GitHub user, and because I've only ever peeked at HNers' GitHub accounts, but I was always under the impression that given the nature of the service, it would have an early-days-of-HN feel wrt to user behaviour.

It was a little disheartening to see the number of Reddit-esque comments that are simply a couple of words along the lines of "omfg" and a constant stream of meme abuse. I expected better from the programming community.

Sigh. Am I just becoming old, jaded and too elitist for my own good?

Re: Ooops.

#45

Post by cruise02 »

shrikant wrote: post #44

Perhaps because I'm not a GitHub user, and because I've only ever peeked at HNers' GitHub accounts, but I was always under the impression that given the nature of the service, it would have an early-days-of-HN feel wrt to user behaviour. It was a little disheartening to see the number of Reddit-esque comments that are simply a couple of words along the lines of "omfg" and a constant stream of meme abuse. I expected b…

No, that was exactly my impression as well. Those comments remind me more of the Daily WTF where everyone points and laughs, but people rarely step forward to explain exactly what the problem is, and more importantly the solution.

Re: Ooops.

#46

Post by srean »

I learned a rather unusual trick to keep myself safe from unintended glob matches. It is not "fool"-proof, but it will probably dilute an unmitigated disaster into an incomplete disaster: Keep a file named -i in the sensitive directories. When glob picks it up, which should be fairly early, it will be treated like a command line argument. Has saved me on occasions.

I also had a friend in school who used to, for whatever reasons, name his files using characters drawn from a pool of only two characters. One being "." the other "*". Please don't ask me why. He would then try to delete some particular file. You can well imagine what would happen next. This happened multiple times, till I went ahead and populated his directories with "-i" files. That worked great.

I usually keep rm aliased to 'rm -i', but once I did get burned. It was not because of hitting return early but because of having a space between a directory and the trailing "/".....while running rm as root. It was taking a bit longer than I had imagined, so I looked again at the prompt to see what had I typed..$#@!&~ :)

Re: Ooops.

#47

Post by mootothemax »

floriancargoet wrote: post #40
jrockway wrote: post #11

I don't remember the exact details, but a few years ago there was a Perl module that did something like: my $path = something_that_can_return_undef_on_failure; `rm -rf /$path`; during the execution of its test suite. The author didn't catch it in testing because he never ran "make test" as root (who would?). But people on the Internet ran "make test" as root, with disastrous consequences.

$ rm -rf / rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on `/' rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe

rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe

Brilliant, at long last at least a bit of protection! :) Sadly, I can still remember doing this to my one of my first Linux installs, albeit via the classic:

rm -fr .*

On the plus side, that day I learned one hell of a lot about how Linux works ;)

Re: Ooops.

#48

Post by callahad »

bradly wrote: post #32

Here is the original bug report. https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/issues/123 I've never heard of BumbleBee, but it must be great if a user can have their machine wiped out and still thank the library author for their work.

The other bug reports linked in the commit are kind of sad. From 122:

"I thinking that something is messed up with bashrc or sh because in few seconds I cannot execute any command in other terminal.

Am I doing something wrong? Hope You can help me."

https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/issues/122

Re: Ooops.

#49

Post by monochromatic »

shrikant wrote: post #44

Perhaps because I'm not a GitHub user, and because I've only ever peeked at HNers' GitHub accounts, but I was always under the impression that given the nature of the service, it would have an early-days-of-HN feel wrt to user behaviour. It was a little disheartening to see the number of Reddit-esque comments that are simply a couple of words along the lines of "omfg" and a constant stream of meme abuse. I expected b…

It's like reading Youtube comments--not for the faint of heart.

And the jab at reddit from the HN pedestal is probably misguided... reddit used to be more like HN, and HN is becoming more like the bad parts of reddit every day.

Every site tends toward Youtube level comments as time passes, and the people who don't like it eventually jump ship to a new site, and then the process repeats itself.

Re: Ooops.

#50

Post by RyanMcGreal »

monochromatic wrote: post #49
shrikant wrote: post #44

Perhaps because I'm not a GitHub user, and because I've only ever peeked at HNers' GitHub accounts, but I was always under the impression that given the nature of the service, it would have an early-days-of-HN feel wrt to user behaviour. It was a little disheartening to see the number of Reddit-esque comments that are simply a couple of words along the lines of "omfg" and a constant stream of meme abuse. I expected b…

It's like reading Youtube comments--not for the faint of heart. And the jab at reddit from the HN pedestal is probably misguided... reddit used to be more like HN, and HN is becoming more like the bad parts of reddit every day. Every site tends toward Youtube level comments as time passes, and the people who don't like it eventually jump ship to a new site, and then the process repeats itself.

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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