Critical typing mistakes

[davidn]

"I've always been afraid of typing as far as rm -rf / and brushing Enter." *
"Oh, I did that once."
"Where was that?"
"Well... we used to have a mail server."

* Therefore instantly removing everything on the computer, although most systems protect against this

Comments

[marcobiagi.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I remember back in the days of DOS being given an executable that purported to simply turn every binary digit on the hard drive to a 0. Funnily enough I never executed it to see.

[davidn]

That would definitely be on the list of things not to run :) I had a "Hard drive low-level format tool" that I kept around, having used it once to actually format a new drive, until I decided to remove it on the grounds that having such destruction available from the Start menu probably wasn't wise.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

At least Linux has protection against that sort of stuff.

sudo rm -rf / and a password, on the other hand... :P

D.F.

[davidn]

It's incredible how you've been indoctrinated into Linux that quickly - it was just something you were experimenting with a few short months ago, now you speak it fluently :)

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Hah, I'm glad it comes across that way! :P

In fact, sudo was the first command I learned (not counting the ones I already knew from DOS etc.); it stands for i>Super-User (says) DO (whatever follows), and is used to access root priveleges. Essentially, Ubuntu doesn't let you run with admin status as standard, like Windows; it asks you for the admin password every time you try and do something that would modify the system, and gives you temporary admin priveleges for that command only. (There's a timer on the password so you don't have to enter it literally every time if you're doing a lot at once, but you still need to repeat sudo for each command.) It stops a whole lot of viruses and nasty stuff, simply because the standard users can't do stuff to bugger the system up, and the virus most often doesn't know what to do if it gets asked for a password as it's used to just walking in and doing its thing.

It's amazing what effect a simple game of Simon Says does for security. :P But yeah, it's about the first thing you learn, roughly equivalent to C:\DOS\run for Linux. :P

D.F.