Pope and Bacon a dangerous combo
After meeting Ubuntu zealots Alan Pope and Jono Bacon at Fosscamp this morning, I made the mistake of leaving my laptop screen unlocked within the range of these two dangerous characters while I went to the bathroom. What’s worse, I left a terminal window with a root prompt open on the desktop. (I don’t remember why– I think I was installing some software earlier.) When I got back, this so-called “Pope” had blown up the font size on my terminal window and added “rm -rf /” at the root prompt.
It was good for a laugh. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the poise to take a screenshot.
Later, it was revealed that the Bacon, not Pope, was the instigator, or so says Pope.
Note for the non-haX0rs in the audience (I guess that’s you, mom): “rm -rf /” is a command that recursively deletes all files in your filesystem. Incidentally, I did once execute that command on an OS X server that I was maintaining a few years ago. I needed to reinstall OS X for some reason, so I tried executing the legendary command. It was pretty sweet– various programs on the desktop crashed, services disappeared, and the machine was eventually rendered unbootable.
Anyway, I won’t make the mistake of leaving my laptop unprotected when Bacon is on this side of the Atlantic.
One other interesting note from Fosscamp– I talked to Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth for a few minutes after one of the morning sessions; he mentioned that the Dell Linux machines that I was so excited about a few months ago were actually Dell’s idea. I had assumed that the whole Dell Ideastorm business was more of a marketing exercise, while Dell and Canonical had actually been planning Dell PCs with Linux for a while. I guess I was wrong.
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:46 pm
`rm -rf /’ is so hopelessly Multics! Come on, Stafford, get with the program. This is 2008, not 1978.
These days, true l33t h@xorz such as myself prefer to bypass the filesystem altogether; that’s why `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1′ has become the new `rm -rf /’
(True l33t h@xorz also don’t go around proclaiming they are l33t h@xorz, nor do they even use those bizarre character substitutions in the first place. I also have feeling that it doesn’t take them 6 months just to write a $@#%ing kernel module.)
Mike
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:50 pm
FUX0r. It really should be `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda’ to zero out the entire disk. But then you might lose your precious Windows partition too. Oh my!
Mike
Winner of “Slowest C/C++ Programmer Ever” award three years running!