[Novalug] ssh as root ( beating a dead horse into the ground)

[Jon LaBadie]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 09:48:00AM -0500, John Holland wrote:
> 
> > For me, the key is to avoid *staying* root for normal activities,
> > since it's very hard to maintain a "superuser" level of care all the
> > time.
> 
> I would agree with that. Early on in my linux days I issued the command
> "rm -rf * mp3 " at the root of the filesystem as root. (the space
> between * and mp3 being the typo). Much hilarity ensued.

You don't have to be root, nor issue it from the root directory,
to feel the wrath of badly typed rm commands.

On the day I was flying out to Denver to deliver a project to a client,
I was bundling the project files for delivery.  They were all in a
single directory but a good bit of kruft had found its way there also.
So I issued, or thought I issued, a "rm -i *" command planning to answer
"y" only to kruft.

When the error message: 'rm: i: no such file or directory" appeared I
realized I had left a space between the "-" and "i".  Immediately pressing
<Delete> (my interupt key) saved about 20% of the files.  Fortunately,
the rest were recovered from backups.

jl
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  novalugml at jgcomp.com
 11226 South Shore Rd		(703) 787-0688 (H)
 Reston, VA  20190		(609) 477-8330 (C)