[Gllug] Is this funny

[James Tullett]

On Wednesday 02 January 2002 15:49, you wrote:
> Simon Trimmer(simon at urbanmyth.org)@Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 11:34:59AM +0000:
> > On 1 Jan 2002, Nix wrote:
> > > This whole house of cards fell completely to pieces when other
> > > filesystems started to be supported, because the knowledge of the
> > > format of a directory was wired into lots of userspace programs :( many
> > > Unixes (such as Linux) even ban read(2)ing from a directory, on the
> > > basis that even if write(2)ing to a directory is banned, if you're
> > > allowed to read(2) from it someone will find a way to rely on that :(
> >
> > It's a bit of a bugger though, I have been in situations (years ago)
> > where people have typed a rm -rf * in the wrong place and taken out
> > useful things like /bin, so you have a live system that is practically
> > useless. Without ls it's nice to be able to cat . :)
>
> i was sat next to someone once, doing support, who'd noticed that
> someone had added a root2 act to his solaris box.  he then preceeded to
> use the lovely gui admintool to remove the user.  and the home diretory.
> he turned to me and said 'what does it mean by command ls not found?'
> with his disk going apeshit in the background.  laugh? i almost sh**
> myself. ;-)

Try dd-ing a kernel image to your __hard__ disk (as I did /once/).   I wasn't
laughing!

And remember echo * may be the poor man's ls but it can be your friend.
--
James

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