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On Friday 25 October 2002 06:36 pm, Eric Noack wrote: |
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> Oh yeah <g>. i was in /tmp and wanted to delete everything there |
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> |
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> so i did |
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> rm -rf * |
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> |
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> just so see that all "hidden" dirs and files in there still where there ;-( |
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> |
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> so i thought i was extremely! intelligent and typed |
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> |
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> rm -rf .* |
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> |
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> to delete all "hidden" files and dirs, starting with a dot |
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> |
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> yeah all of them! |
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> |
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> like . and .. for example |
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That exact mistake bit me on a old Sun OS 4.x box a few years ago ... cost me |
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a weekend to recover that system (it was a production box ... visions of my |
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young career, all of 3 weeks old, dying a quick death danced through my |
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aching head). |
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It is definitely a right of passage ... :-) |
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I *think* the GNU file utilities have fixed that behavior (though I'd try it |
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in a sandbox to make sure), so that 'rm .*' does not try to delete . or .. |
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anymore, but of course if you get used to that, then transition to a non-GNU |
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UNIX syste ... |
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|
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Jean. |
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