The classic Unix horror story

#1

Post by nar » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 6:18 PM UTC

The classic Unix horror story
lug.wsu.edu

Re: The classic Unix horror story

#2

Post by retroafroman » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 6:24 PM UTC

I'd say this is a classic Unix success story, told in the context of an almost horror. It shows how a serious understanding of Unix-foo can save the day when someone makes a mistake.

Re: The classic Unix horror story

#3

Post by hernan7 » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 6:40 PM UTC

I still remember my "rm -fr /" episode after almost 20 years. It was slightly different, something related to chmod'ing some files under /etc on an AIX server:

   $ cd /etc
   $ chmod 600 some_file * # instead of some_file.*

oops... Thank God for boot diskettes.

Re: The classic Unix horror story

#4

Post by _cbsz » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 7:10 PM UTC

Is there a "social news sites classics" directory yet? I would love to see reposts of oldies no longer justified due to a good directory of these things, prominently linked.

Pretty please do not create such a directory in this comments thread.

Re: The classic Unix horror story

#5

Post by sketerpot » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 7:37 PM UTC

hernan7 wrote: post #3

I still remember my "rm -fr /" episode after almost 20 years. It was slightly different, something related to chmod'ing some files under /etc on an AIX server: $ cd /etc $ chmod 600 some_file * # instead of some_file.* oops... Thank God for boot diskettes.

I was playing with FUSE, and had managed to mount a loopback filesystem. And then, for some ill-considered reason, I tried to delete the directory that I had mounted it inside.

I managed to Ctrl-C it before it ate any files in /home, but I still had some nasty cleanup work to get the computer back in working order again. Thank god for LiveCDs.

Re: The classic Unix horror story

#6

Post by jff » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 7:53 PM UTC

Man, how many times is this story going to be submitted?

Re: The classic Unix horror story

#7

Post by mkramlich » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 8:02 PM UTC

frequent automated offsite backups are your friend

Re: The classic Unix horror story

#8

Post by julius_geezer » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 8:07 PM UTC

Back in the dinosaur days I worked with DG minis running AOS/VS, a Multics descendant. From time to time an operator would run the equivalent of cd /; rm -rf, halting everything. The neat thing about the delete command was that would zap the PMGR, peripherals manager, quite early on; unable to communicate with the disks, the delete would fail. Generally one could then locate an older version of :PMGR to rename, then recover. Failing that, one could boot off a "systape" and recover.

Not as hard-core as the recovery through emacs, but greatly welcome under stress.

Re: The classic Unix horror story

#9

Post by randrews » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 8:30 PM UTC

I've never actually been bitten by rm (or done anything remotely this badass) but in college I did have a bad Unix moment:

Late at night, I was tarring up a finished project right before emailing it to my professor. I ran:

    tar -cvf *.cpp *.h something.tar

instead of:

    tar -cvf something.tar *.cpp *.h

It happily wrote most of my project into a tar file on top of the first source file, then complained that something.tar didn't exist. I overwrote "array.cpp" or something like that, and had to rewrite it (this was before I used source control for anything, and a large part of why I learned to use source control).

Writing this comment, I had to look up the order of the parameters to tar; I still can't remember. Stupid tar.

Re: The classic Unix horror story

#10

Post by watmough » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 8:38 PM UTC

My terrible UNIX, or really SunOS/Solaris moments have been:

  o typing 'halt' into the wrong xterm, shutting down well planners
  o and likely on the same network, jacking up the NIS+ on Solaris

It's been a constant itch that I never did manage to understand what I was doing wrong, such that NIS+ wouldn't restart correctly.