Indeed....There are three types of sysadmins...1. Those who have done something monumentally stupid at some time, 2. Those that will...and 3. LIARS.Its surprising how long the system stays up when you run that, before the OS crashes. Doesn't reboot particularly successfully.specially if you run it with sudo before and add -rf /* after the "remind me" command
If you've forgotten your aliases, doesn't the alias "rm" stand for "Remind Me"?(Please don't anyone try it.)
![:lol:]( "Laughing")
Please don't anyone do that either !
Every Unix/Linux sysadmin either has a story about some variant of this, has successfully gone through therapy and blocked it, or is an accomplished liar. Getting users to fess up is a different topic.
In my case, as a very young and naive Unix sysadmin..I managed to accidentally wipe a customer's hard drive...I was logged in as root. I walked away from the console. While I was away, someone must have done a "cd /". I returned and didn't bother to "pwd" (no current directory prompt back then)...Then did rm -rm *....oops
As you say; the error wasn't immediately obvious... 
Fortunately; I had backups and managed to waffle my way out of it with the customer.
Lesson learnt. These days I always check and check again before doing anything dramatic...It's really just a variation of what my dad; a mechanical engineer used to drum in to m..."measure several times; cut once".
Statistics: Posted by kip_the_elder — Thu Feb 29, 2024 7:38 am