Watching rm recursively burn through your filesystem is a right of passage.
I had a genius intern. Straight out of high school, his understanding of asynchronous design put plenty of my peers to shame. Course, his unix experience, especially permissions in this case, was a bit light.
I decided to use OSX's iChat to share my screen with him. As you know, iChat used to allow full control of the local machine to the remote viewer. My bright-eyed genius intern realized this:
Oh cool! I can move your mouse!
...he says, as he starts clicking around...
Can I type?!
...and he types "rm -rf /" in my open terminal.
In panic, I smashed every key on my keyboard, fortunately scoring a CONTROL+C relatively quickly. I hoped the damage was minimal, mostly praying it did not touch my home directory. I watched as every application I tried to open failed to start...
Every application I had installed, up to somewhere near X in the alphabet, had been deleted without prejudice before I managed to kill the command. Fortunately my home directory was safe; thank you "/Users" on OSX.
My intern's response was:
That command won't do anything, I didn't sudo it!
That's the day I setup Time Machine on that system.
I had a genius intern. Straight out of high school, his understanding of asynchronous design put plenty of my peers to shame. Course, his unix experience, especially permissions in this case, was a bit light.
I decided to use OSX's iChat to share my screen with him. As you know, iChat used to allow full control of the local machine to the remote viewer. My bright-eyed genius intern realized this:
...he says, as he starts clicking around... ...and he types "rm -rf /" in my open terminal.In panic, I smashed every key on my keyboard, fortunately scoring a CONTROL+C relatively quickly. I hoped the damage was minimal, mostly praying it did not touch my home directory. I watched as every application I tried to open failed to start...
Every application I had installed, up to somewhere near X in the alphabet, had been deleted without prejudice before I managed to kill the command. Fortunately my home directory was safe; thank you "/Users" on OSX.
My intern's response was:
That's the day I setup Time Machine on that system.