{"id":13,"date":"2006-10-25T01:42:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-25T08:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sp2hari.com\/?p=13"},"modified":"2020-06-20T09:05:48","modified_gmt":"2020-06-20T09:05:48","slug":"rm-rf-o","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sp2hari.com\/index.php\/2006\/10\/25\/rm-rf-o\/","title":{"rendered":"rm -rf * :-O"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Went home for diwali hols and the moment i entered my room , the first thing i did is to switch on the comp. I have already taken a resolution that no tech , no php , no linux for the next 5 days [ resolutions are meant be broken , you know \ud83d\ude42 ] . So instead of booting the comp in linux , i booted the comp in windows ( i had no clue what i was going to do in windows ) .<\/p>\n

My sister had stored a few harry potter movies which i was in no mood to see.After some 5-10 minutes of arbit clicking , i decided windows is not for me :-). I noticed a folder called books which was the only useful thing for me in my comp apart from the linux. But reading a book will make me break the resolution. Though reluctant , i started with the “Unix Haters Book”. When i started , i never had an idea how great the book will be .<\/p>\n

The book will make anyone hate unix ( this includes linux also ) and i am not an exception. That too even after the first chapter , i started to realize the drawbacks [this is a better way to say hate \ud83d\ude42 ] of shell , the most powerful and the tool which i liked the most in Unix or Linux.<\/p>\n

So here is the details of the first chapter in short. It mostly blasted a singlr command “rm”. Now i realise the deadliest command one can ever type is “rm”.<\/p>\n

The first thing i liked in the book is the way they described unix.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153 Who would have thought it: Unix, the hacker\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pornography.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\nI have no clue why the author mentioned Unix as hacker’s pornography , but i seriously liked the guts of the author to say something like this . I did realize that this book is good after reading the foreword ( very few books can do this ) . After reading the first chapter , the author made sure that whenever i type rm , i will surely remember this book.<\/p>\n

The first chapter started with the quote saying
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I
\ndon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think that this is a coincidence.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u201dAnonymous<\/p>\n

Another chapter said this
\nThe most horrifying thing about Unix is that, no matter how many
\ntimes you hit yourself over the head with it, you never quite manage
\nto lose consciousness. It just goes on and on.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u201dPatrick Sobalvarro
\nThe attack on \u00e2\u20ac\u0153rm\u00e2\u20ac\u009d gave many real life-horror stories .
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153rm\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Is Forever<\/span>
\nA series of exchanges on the Usenet news group alt.folklore.computers illustrates our case:
\nDate: Wed, 10 Jan 90
\nFrom: djones@megatest.uucp (Dave Jones)
\nSubject: rm *
\nNewsgroups: alt.folklore.computers2
\nAnybody else ever intend to type:
\n% rm *.o
\nAnd type this by accident:
\n% rm *>o
\nNow you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got one new empty file called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153o\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, but plenty of room
\nfor it!
\nActually, you might not even get a file named \u00e2\u20ac\u0153o\u00e2\u20ac\u009d since the shell documen-
\ntation doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t specify if the output file \u00e2\u20ac\u0153o\u00e2\u20ac\u009d gets created before or after the
\nwildcard expansion takes place. The shell may be a programming lan-
\nguage, but it isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a very precise one.<\/p>\n

In my comp i got a file named o , seems the output file gets created after the wild card expansion takes place.<\/p>\n

Here is the next real life story <\/span>
\nDate: Wed, 10 Jan 90 15:51 CST
\nFrom: ram@attcan.uucp
\nSubject: Re: rm *
\nNewsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
\nI too have had a similar disaster using rm. Once I was removing a file
\nsystem from my disk which was something like \/usr\/foo\/bin. I was in \/
\nusr\/foo and had removed several parts of the system by:
\n% rm -r .\/etc
\n% rm -r .\/adm
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6and so on. But when it came time to do .\/bin, I missed the period.
\nSystem didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like that too much.
\nUnix wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t designed to live after the mortal blow of losing its \/bin direc-
\ntory. An intelligent operating system would have given the user a chance to
\nrecover (or at least confirm whether he really wanted to render the operat-
\ning system inoperable).
\nThe third case is really really important and a dangerous one .<\/span>
\nDate: Wed, 10 Jan 90 10:40 CST
\nFrom: kgg@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Kees Goossens)
\nSubject: Re: rm *
\nNewsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
\nThen there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the story of the poor student who happened to have a
\nfile called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153-r\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in his home directory. As he wanted to remove all his
\nnon directory files (I presume) he typed:
\n% rm *
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 And yes, it does remove everything except the beloved \u00e2\u20ac\u0153-r\u00e2\u20ac\u009d file\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6
\nLuckily our backup system was fairly good.<\/p>\n

Now i stopped reading the book. I realised that i will surely start a Windows User Group , Trichy if i complete the book. \ud83d\ude1b .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Went home for diwali hols and the moment i entered my room , the first thing i did is to switch on the comp. I have already taken a resolution that no tech , no php , no linux for the next 5 days [ resolutions are meant be broken …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-code"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sp2hari.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sp2hari.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sp2hari.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sp2hari.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sp2hari.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sp2hari.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1481,"href":"https:\/\/sp2hari.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/1481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sp2hari.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sp2hari.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sp2hari.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}