The glory of sudo allows you to granularly deny certain uses of commands mixed with certain arguments/options. I am sure I read a document online a few years back on the subject of safe sudo practices. I had developed a nice sudoers file for use on an email server system shortly after a colleague accidentally ran a similar command at the root level of the mailbox directory. -------- Original message -------- From: Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> Date: To: TCLUG List <tclug-list at mn-linux.org> Subject: [tclug-list] worst Linux/UNIX command line mistake, ever I have a few users on a box at work. Some are not active. I'm also about to move everything to a new machine. This is the stupid thing I did. The hard drive was full so I needed to make some space. I copied files from /home/marc to another machine and then was going to remove /home/marc. So I did this... cd /home/marc sudo rm -rf * <-- that would have been OK, but I killed that command cd .. sudo rm -rf marc <-- what I intended to do, which would have been fine sudo rm -rf * <-- what I did instead That would have wiped every file out of /home if I hadn't realized almost instantly what I had done. So I hit Ctrl-C a couple of times fast and looked at the damage. Nothing was lost except for all of the files for the user whose name was first in alphabetical order. All 858 MB of files. Luckily, this user was probably just using the account to transfer files between other machines on a firewalled network, so it might not be a big deal, but I'm not sure. I consider myself lucky that I stopped it quickly, but that doesn't help him because his files are all gone. Yikes. I'll bet you know you should be careful with this command: sudo rm -rf * That's like the most dangerous command there is, except maybe for this one: sudo rm -rf /* But we don't use that command in real life, just a joke for noobs. Mike _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20130518/92b98ed4/attachment.html>