The cries of "Oh no!" emerge from each office as the realization slowly dawns

re: The cries of "Oh no!" emerge from each office as the realization slowly dawns

cheong00 — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 07:58:03 GMT

@Kevin: Actually this new variant is to play with students that happens to have Unix cluster account (usually without root access), so "rm -rf /" would have no effect anyway even without that protection.

And ruining the users own account for his/her bad behaviour/temper serves them just right.

re: The cries of "Oh no!" emerge from each office as the realization slowly dawns

Kevin — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 19:39:25 GMT

@cheong00: Of course, in most sensible shells, *this* still works just fine:

rm -rf /*

(You could also type out the '--no-preserve-root' switch, but it's long and ugly.)

re: The cries of "Oh no!" emerge from each office as the realization slowly dawns

Drak — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 05:23:40 GMT

@Kwpolska, Joshua: I believe it says it will not work, but have you actually tried if it really does not work?

My favourite of these 'helpful suggestions' used to be on windows when people were using telnet to ask people to swith to tty4 (alt-f4 ;)

re: The cries of "Oh no!" emerge from each office as the realization slowly dawns

cheong00 — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 03:09:28 GMT

@Evan: Btw, I think the "current" trick is "rm -rf ~/", not "/" anymore.

re: The cries of "Oh no!" emerge from each office as the realization slowly dawns

James — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 03:09:22 GMT

A year ago I trolled my company of several thousand people to try to catch people who inadvertently use reply-to-all. I set up a mailing list with nobody subscribed to it, and I then sent out email addressed to it but BCC'ing almost everybody in the company. The email explained that the entire company was subscribed (which wasn't true) and solicited some useless information from everyone. Anyone who used reply-to-all sent mail to both myself and to the empty mailing list, and I had configured the mailing list to auto-respond with a message explaining that the person had just failed a reply-to-all test.

(The failure rate was actually kind of low (~1.6%), and a few people got really upset at me, so it probably wasn't worthwhile in retrospect. Most of my colleagues enjoyed it, though.)

re: The cries of "Oh no!" emerge from each office as the realization slowly dawns

Evan — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 16:53:53 GMT

@Kwpolska

It's a good thing all versions of 'rm' have that. Oh wait, only GNU's does. :-)

re: The cries of "Oh no!" emerge from each office as the realization slowly dawns

Joshua — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 15:34:45 GMT

@Drak: What do you think chroot() is for?

re: The cries of "Oh no!" emerge from each office as the realization slowly dawns

Kwpolska — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 14:31:47 GMT

@ Drak

% rm --help

[...]

--preserve-root do not remove '/' (default)

There.

re: The cries of "Oh no!" emerge from each office as the realization slowly dawns

Eric — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 14:17:00 GMT

We had a few of these "Bedlams" at a large company I worked for. I loved watching the chaos unfold. The best part was when an employee in Europe ripped the "stupid Americans" for using replying all and of course he hit reply all on his email.

re: The cries of "Oh no!" emerge from each office as the realization slowly dawns

Ted — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 07:01:45 GMT

I knew a fair number of interns on the thread, and it was interesting to watch and see as each of them decided, "okay, enough FTEs have replied that I should actually respond to this." They were all suitably embarrassed afterwards.