From: robjohn@ocdis01.UUCP (Contractor Bob Johnson)Organization: Tinker Air Force Base, OklahomaCleaning out an old directory, I did 'rm *', then noticed several filesthat began with dot (.profile, etc) still there. So, in a fit of obtusebrilliance, I typed...rm -rf .* &By the time I got it stopped, it had chewed through 3 filesystems whichall had to be restored from tape (.* expands to ../*, and the -r makesit keep walking up the directory tree). Live and learn...--------------------------------------------------------------------From: samuel@cs.ubc.ca (Stephen Samuel)Organization: University of British Columbia, CanadaSome time ago, I was editing our cron file to remove core more than a dayold. Unfortunately, thru recursing into VI sessions, I ended up saving anintermediate (wron) version of this file with an extra '-o' in it.find / -name core -o -atime +1 -exec /bin/rm {} \;The cute thing about this is that it leaves ALL core files intact, andremoves any OTHER file that hasn't been accessed in the last 24 hours.Although the script ran at 4AM, I was the first person to notice this,in the early afternoon.. I started to get curious when I noticed thatSOME man pages were missing, while others were. Up till then, I was pleasedto see that we finally had some free disk space. Then I started to noticethe pattern.Really unpleasant was the fact that no system backups had taken place allsummer (and this was a research lab).The only saving grace is that most of the really active files had beenaccessed in the previous day (thank god I didn't do this on a saturday).I was also lucky that I'd used tar the previous day, as well.I still felt sick having to tell people in the lab what happened.--------------------------------------------------------------------From: weave@bach.udel.edu (Ken Weaverling)Organization: University of DelawareA friend of mine called me up saying he no longer could log into hissystem. I asked him what he had done recently, and found out that hethought that all executable programs in /bin /usr/bin /etc and so onshould be owned by bin, since they were all binaries! So he hadchown'ed them all.--------------------------------------------------------------------From: hirai@cc.swarthmore.edu (Eiji Hirai)Organization: Information Services, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USAI wanted to create a second swap partition on another disk and made thepartition start at sector 0 of the disk! (which sounded ok at the time sinceall other regular 'a' partitions started on sector 0) Every time I rebooted,fsck would complain about missing partition tables - I initially suspectedthat the disk was bad but I later realized that swapping was overwriting thepartition table. I had lost an unknown percentage of the financial data forthe institution that I was working for at the time, right when they werebeing audited! Yikes! Anyway, we were able to recover the data and lifereturned to normal but I did wonder at the time whether I could still keepmy job there.--------------------------------------------------------------------More Linux/Unix horror stories can be found HERE