25 Apr
2017
25 Apr
'17
4:19 p.m.
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