Unix and Linux Horror Stories And Actual Help

[ Thanks to Mike Golvach for this link. ]

"Some time ago, I was editing our cron file to remove core more than a day old. Unfortunately, thru recursing into VI sessions, I ended up saving an intermediate (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, and removes 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 that SOME man pages were missing, while others were. Up till then, I was pleased to see that we finally had some free disk space. Then I started to notice the pattern."

Complete Story

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