Intrepid Blog » typo http://blog.affien.com A few thoughts Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:47:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 The rm -r / typo http://blog.affien.com/archives/2006/07/27/the-rm-r-typo/ http://blog.affien.com/archives/2006/07/27/the-rm-r-typo/#comments Thu, 27 Jul 2006 17:01:21 +0000 Bas Westerbaan http://blog.w-nz.com/archives/2006/07/27/the-rm-r-typo/ Today I accidently made a (yes, very stupid) typo in a root console:

rm -r /

I noticed the typo almost directly, but rm managed to wipe out my /bin and started removing parts of /boot. This situation wasn’t very helpful for the stability of my system, as you might understand.

For the windows user: it’s a bit like deleting half of all executables in the windows folder.

One key difference: when running linux, you can fix it easily. I booted a livecd, mounted my system, copied the /bin from a stage3 tarball to my root partition and rebooted.

And it’s working again! There were some complaints about a libproc version mismatch with the binaries, but that’ll be easily solved by a emerge -e system.

You just got to love linux. (and other nixes for that matter)

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