[ILUG] replacing the rm binary :-)

[Bacon Zombie]

John,

If any luser start getting bad habits then you could always install "
Suicide Linux " that should quickly reteach them.

"You know how sometimes if you mistype a filename in Bash, it corrects your
spelling and runs the command anyway? Such as when changing directory, or
opening a file.
I have invented Suicide Linux.
Any time - any time - you type any remotely incorrect command, the
interpreter creatively resolves it into "rm -rf /" and wipes your hard
drive.
It's a game. Like walking a tightrope. You have to see how long you can
continue to use the operating system before losing all your data."

http://qntm.org/suicide

BaconZombie

*….all text in this mail is double-**rot13 encrypted. ...***


On 2 September 2010 09:23, John Madden
<john+ilug at jmadden.eu<john%2Bilug at jmadden.eu>
> wrote:

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> On (01/09/10 20:39), Lisa Muir said:
> > I've been thinking about it, and wondering if it would be an idea to
> > replace rm with a script based on mv to make it easier to recover from
> > incidents like this. It gets complex when you consider the various
> > commandline switches and then handling multiple files of the same name
> > in wherever you move the files, missing folder context. Was thinking
> > of moving files to a zapme folder in some location with a cron script
> > to actually delete files or folders in zapme folders which are older
> > than 1 week old.
> >
> I read somewhere recently that doing this is a bad idea, on the
> individual level at least - maybe not so for companies.
>
> Basically, 'rm' is 'rm' everywhere. If you replace it with a protective
> wrapper on a system, then people using that system get used to the
> protection, and no longer think of 'rm' as 'to all intents and purposes,
> that file is now gone'. They eventually rely on the protection, so when
> they move systems, and the same wrapper isn't in place, they get hit
> hard (probably multiple times) before reverting their behaviour.
>
> On the company level, this could hit you if you upgrade to a new system,
> or if some overzealous package management system decides to overwrite
> your wrapper with the original 'rm' again!
>
> The best "workaround" I saw was to alias 'rm' to 'rm -i'. At least this
> is portable and easy to set up.
>
> - --
> John Madden -- john at jmadden.eu
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