From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Oct 16 20:54:34 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from hand.dotat.at (hand.dotat.at [212.240.134.135]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1906A37B4C5 for ; Mon, 16 Oct 2000 20:54:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from fanf by hand.dotat.at with local (Exim 3.15 #3) id 13lNpl-0000oE-00; Tue, 17 Oct 2000 03:54:37 +0000 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 03:54:37 +0000 From: Tony Finch To: "Jason C. Wells" Cc: Kris Kirby , freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Traditional UN*X conventions (Or: Why not to login as root?) Message-ID: <20001017035437.B537@hand.dotat.at> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2i In-Reply-To: Organization: Covalent Technologies, Inc Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org "Jason C. Wells" wrote: > >Let's consider the following typo: > ># cd / ># rm -rf /tmp/ * > >Which the user intended to be: > ># cd / ># rm -rf /tmp/* > >If you are in fact root, then you are in fact very, very screwed if you >issue the typo. In this case, not being root will save you from removing >every last file on every mounted disc. Well, one usually spots the mistake and interrupts it fairly quickly. There's /boot /bin /dev /etc before you get to anything important :-) (One of the disadvantages of softupdates, however, is that it'll get through those directories in the blink of an eye...) I have managed to recover a machine that had crashed and destroyed those directories. Recovering it was tricky, because of various infelicities in the fixit CD and the difficulty of remounting / read-write when /dev is missing. Oh, and init does interesting things when /bin/sh is missing (it oscillates rapidly back-and-forth between failing to start /etc/rc and failing to drop into single-user mode). Tony. -- en oeccget g mtcaa f.a.n.finch v spdlkishrhtewe y dot@dotat.at eatp o v eiti i d. fanf@covalent.net To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message