Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!unido!infbs!ramz!ruediger
From: ruediger@ramz.UUCP (Ruediger Helsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: is sinix rm -r * different ?
Message-ID: <1523@ramz.UUCP>
Date: 3 Jul 90 18:25:31 GMT
References: <1990Jun20.073620.15486@diku.dk>
Reply-To: ruediger@ramz.UUCP (Ruediger Helsch)
Distribution: comp
Organization: TU Braunschweig Mechanikzentrum, Germany
Lines: 13

In article <1990Jun20.073620.15486@diku.dk> nomann@rimfaxe.diku.dk (Ole Nomann Thomsen) writes:
>Recently, I heard about some poor superuser, that tried to delete all of
>a users files by cd'ing to the users $HOME and "rm -r *"'ing. This
>producede more than the desired result, since his `*' expanded to `.' and
>even `..' too. ("Gurfle" to cite the hackers jargon posings).

Happened simailarly to me. One evening I was in a hurry removing files on /tmp.
I typed "rm -rf *", but a listing showed me that there were some files
(beginning with '.') not removed. So i repeated "rm -rf .*". I waited for a
response, and after maybe 15 seconds i became suspicious something might go
wrong. I aborted with ^C, but too late. I typed "ls", and the answer was
"ls: command not found". The /bin directory was already gone. It was going
to be a long night.