On VMS, you can configure a system to make auto-backups. It does this by placing a semicolon at the end of each file and having a number increment each time the file is saved. Thus, you can get listings like: thesis.txt;1 thesis.txt;2 thesis.txt;3 joke.txt;1 paper.doc;1 paper.doc;2 While in college, I was working the lab and a user came in asking for help with his account. It was full and he couldn't save the latest revision of his paper. I was already working two calls, so when he asked "how do I remove files from my account", I answered without thinking: " DELETE *.*;* " In about twenty seconds, I realized my mistake, but the damage was done. His files were all gone, during finals week, and I didn't have access to the backup system to restore them. Oops. -Josh On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > 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<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/e143492d/attachment.html>