rm -rf ./*
Anyone who is a geek has run this powerful and dangerous command on the wrong file system- that is if you run a real operating system such and Linux/BSD, or one of its power house brethren.
This time it was my turn. I’m getting this server ready to be replaced. In the process, I’m mapping the disk partitions, writing down the mount points, etc. something that really should have been done when I set it up. I’m pretty sure that I did, but who knows where I placed the documentation? One of my partitions seemed to be a backup… I didn’t remember it being a backup as such, but that’s what it looked like. So I proceeded to run rm -rf ./* on that partition- temporarily mounted on /mnt/temp1. Too late, I thought, let me look one more time… sure enough it was also mounted on /usr and by the time I noticed /usr/bin was gone. Luckily, no data is lost, it’s just a matter of putting the new machine into place- and pretty soon too. Don’t be surprised when the machine is down for a couple of hours on 13/02/2005.
Remember don’t recklessly run rm -rf * as root and always document your systems.
