How to Kill a Linux/Unix System and Live to Tell the Tale

“Notice there is a space between the slash “/” and the asterisk
“*”. I had pressed enter and eventually realized it was taking
longer than I expected to remove what I thought I was removing,
should have been about 2 seconds. By the time I understood my error
and canceled the command almost all of /etc was gone. For you
command line novices I will explain what I did wrong in the command
used. I basically told the remove command, “rm”, to delete
everything recursively in both “olddirectory/” and the current
working directory by adding that unintended space after the slash
followed by that asterisk. Yes, that is A Very Bad Thing as the
/etc directory tree is a critical system directory under Unix and
GNU/Linux.

“Did this kill the system? Well, yes and no. As long as I did
not reboot the system I was okay. Had I made the mistake of
rebooting the system I would have had more problems recovering than
I cared to have. The Unix system happily churned along with an
empty /etc directory and I was able to copy all the company data
off the server to a PC on the LAN, including the Quickbooks file
that had all the accounting data in it. Then I could decide on
staying with SCO, which was starting to make noises against
GNU/Linux, or move to something else. I decided to move to FreeBSD
on the file server and did so.”

Complete
Story