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

[Corey Lindsly]

> I had to laugh when I read that because what you don't know is it was part
> of my old Unix wizards test which was left over from a the day when one of
> our hackers (whom I think you would later get to know so I'll not name him)
> accidentally typed: rm -rf . as root from his / on his workstation.
> 
> Because /bin/rmdir had been lost, he started getting errors when rmdir  was
> forked.  So he hit  ^C, but he had already lost:  /bin, /dev, /etc, /lib,
> most of /usr.  He was a developer in the networking group so he was working
> on network code which we could not trust would not panic (in fact we
> disconnected the node from the ethernet immediately just in case).   But we
> did have pretty much everything in /usr/bin/[s-z]* -- that is we think it
> was deleting files in /usr/bin when he stopped it.

It was in a situation similar to this that I learned the blessed 
usefulness of echo * as a crude substitute for /bin/ls 

--corey