[PLUG] That's It! Nautilus is HISTORY!

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Wed Sep 7 03:23:04 UTC 2005


On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, AthlonRob wrote:

> Hang in there... we've all done it (deleted a bunch of files accidentally)
> before and have lived to tell about it!

> Perhaps we should all share our "root oops" stories or something to make
> the new guy feel better?  :-)

   OK. I'll start.

   One day, soon after I received my new Sony notebook from Emperor Linux, I
was doing some administrative work -- su'd to root -- and meant to type 'rm
-f usr/'. However, for reasons I need not mention, I was seriously distracted
and typed 'rm -f /usr'. Of course, I instantly recognized my error, but there
was nothing to do but wait until the entire filesystem was deleted. Sigh.

   Fortunately, the fine folks at Emperor Linux know that we mere mortals get
distracted and do foolish things by accident. They have a recovery partition
on the hard drive. One telephone call and a half-hour later and all was well
again.

   Then there was the time when I -- as a user -- meant to type 'rm -f .*~',
but the fickle finger of fate was too fast for my slow brain and I hit the
[Enter] key before the tilde. Do you know just how many dot-files you have in
_your_ home directory? Can you name them?

   In this case, a trip to the back office brought forth the last full backup
and a restore of all ~/.* fixed that up.

   These two instances are why I 1) backup every night (incrementally) and do
a full backup each Friday night and 2) always make an alias for rm so that it
asks me if I really want to do the deletion. Sometimes, being a touch typist
has its down side.

Rich

-- 
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President     |   Author of "Quantifying Environmental
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM) |  Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic"
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517         Fax: 503-667-8863



More information about the PLUG mailing list