[GRLUG] RM *

Steve Romanow slestak989 at gmail.com
Thu May 17 13:44:32 EDT 2012


I have myself trained to pause, a sometimes emabrassingly long pause when I
am doing an rm.  I hope to never take it for granted.

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 1:14 PM, John Wesorick <john at wesorick.com> wrote:

> @Mike - I'm glad modern *nixes make that assumption. I've done that
> several times without thinking about it, but it makes sense that it would
> have had that behavior.
>
>
> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 12:55 PM, Mike Williams <knightperson at zuzax.com>wrote:
>
>> A similar story, which fortunately is not repeatable on modern flavors of
>> *nix, is this one. I guy needs to wipe a directory, so he types rm * or so,
>> but leaves all the hidden files: anything starting with a period. So he
>> type rm -rf .* to get rid of them. On Unix of the day, that wildcard is
>> evaluated literally and includes .<anything>, including .. the parent
>> directory. Which it "descends" into and recursively removes everything
>> there, working its way up to the root! Fortunately, modern machines assume
>> that if you type rm .* you really mean rm .?* (or whatever it is).
>>
>>
>> On 05/17/2012 12:26 PM, Adam M. Erickson wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks Casey, I just shared this with a new Linux Admin/DBA I had the
>>> pleasure of training.
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>>
>>> Adam M. Erickson
>>>
>>> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 10:57 AM, Casey DuBois<casey at grlug.org>  wrote:
>>>
>>>> Anyone ever use RM * when they shouldn't have?
>>>> It's been done:
>>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?**v=EL_g0tyaIeE&feature=player_**embedded<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL_g0tyaIeE&feature=player_embedded>
>>>>
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>
>
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