rm -rf and fat fingers

[Rolf G Nielsen]

Jimmie James wrote:
> So here I was, half asleep, removing some old directories as root, and 
> here's what I did...sitting in /home/jimmie after su
> 
> jimmie at jimmiejaz <101> [0] /home/jimmie#rm -rf cd /usr/local/lib   (note 
> the space, the PWD is home/jimmie/)
> 
> Now, a lot of libs went missing from /usr/local/lib. With libchk, last 
> locatedb I've been able to reinstall most of the libs.
> My ~/ *seems* unaffected, but I'm worried about that, I don't notice 
> anything missing, but I could be wrong.
> 
> What I'm thinking is the rm -rf found no 'cd' and moved to wipe out 
> /usr/local/lib  Would this be a correct assumption?
> 
> And yes, I sat in the stupid corner with the dunce hat on.
> 
> 

Hi Jimmie,

Out of curiousity, what were you trying to do when you issued that command?

And this reminds me of an equally stupid thing I did a few years ago.
I had a directories named share on three different partitions. These 
were for files that I and my then current gf shared. At one point I 
wanted to clean them all out, and issued this command:

find -s / -type d -name share -exec rm -Rd {}/* \; -exec rm -Rd {}/.* \;

Fortunately I had backups. And after that I renamed those share 
directories to something else.

And yes, I too sat in the stupid corner.

-- 

Rolf Nielsen