[Swlug] Mint difficulties

[Daniel Morris]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 09:14:31AM +0000, Colin Law via Swlug wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Mar 2020 at 06:52, Neil Greenwood via Swlug
> <swlug at mailman.lug.org.uk> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 19 Mar 2020, 21:28 Keith Edmunds via Swlug, <swlug at mailman.lug.org.uk> wrote:
> >>
> >> Anyone want to speculate about what happened?
> >
> > You get an error message and it refuses to delete all your files.
> >
> > However, rm minus-rf ~ does still remove your home directory, if I remember rightly.
> 
> It is good that a trap has been put in for the system delete, I will
> have to stop spreading that fake news.  I wonder what happens if you
> try to delete /etc/
> I will have to try it next time I am reinstalling a system.
> 

Have to admit I've avoided those class of problems for a while after
learning the hardway. On every system I now set an alias for rm to
confirm deletions and a different keyword if I'm too lazy to bang in the
path myself:

alias rm='rm -i'
alias nuke='/bin/rm -f $*'

Lots of systems and routers (slimmed down busybox in a few cases) don't
have those niceties of user protections, so best to never get
complacent, and make sure that muscle memory doesn't take over when
banging out commands.

I once untar'd an ancient backup tape with explicit paths from /
straight over a very finely tuned configuration of /etc on Solaris 2.4,
a few days after the experienced sysadmin had moved on and was fortunate
I'd waited for the 20 or so users to leave before I'd accomplished this;
and really thankful I realised and hit Ctrl-C before the tape reached
the home directories! It was a long night trying to unwind the damage.

I have nuked whole disks & partitions a few times clumsily with dd when
intending to prep SD/MMC/USB images - I can't recommend SUSE Studio
Imagewriter enough to avoid putting an iso image where it doesn't
belong.

 Daniel