[TUHS] was turmoil, moving to rm -rf /

Dan Cross crossd at gmail.com
Tue Apr 25 10:44:43 AEST 2017


Am I the only one who mentally says, "f*ck recursively" whenever I type,
"rm -fr" ? (f*ck being fsck, of course.)

On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 7:59 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> This is gonna seem like I'm tooting my own horn, and I am a little, but
> here's an rm -rf / story.
>
> Clem will be amused because I was a junior or senior in college and a sys
> admin for a Masscomp with a 40MB disk with 20 users.  And I did some
> version
> of rm -rf /, realized part way through that I screwed up, and killed it.
> But /bin and /dev were gone so putting things back together was hard.
>
> But I did it and wrote up this little note for the people who came after
> me, if I was stupid enough to do this someone else would, was my thinking.
> You can get a sense of how scared I was in it if you read it carefully.
> It was a very long night.
>
> For an undergrad, I think it's not bad?  Maybe?  I dunno, I look at how
> much I needed to have understood to get the system back up, that's a lot
> of reading, playing, experience.  Love that Geophysics department, they
> pushed me.
>
> And it was during my (brief) foray into the *roff -me macros (I went
> -ms and never looked back).  Roff source on request to anyone who is
> twisted enough to want it.
>
> http://mcvoy.com/lm/masscomp-restore.pdf
>
> Complete with all the typos.
>
> --lm
>
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