4 ms·
A colleague of mine once destroyed a customer's system with a middle mouse button fat finger. He was copying a listing all of the executables in various locati
by kstenerud 3y ago
A colleague of mine once destroyed a customer's system with a middle mouse button fat finger.
He was copying a listing all of the executables in various locations on the machine he'd created using ls -l, into a text document (logged in as root). Unfortunately, he accidentally middle-clicked while moving the mouse to the text editor, and it pasted everything into the shell.
Since it was mostly symlinks in the standard /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin etc, the shell dutifully redirected garbage into each destination binary, rendering the OS unusable.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> Since it was mostly symlinks in the standard /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin etc, the shell dutifully redirected garbage into each destination binary, rendering the OS unusable. One must be root to be able to do that.
- livrem 3y agoOne of the terminal emulators I use, possibly the one that comes with lxqt that Lubuntu installs by default, pops up an "are you sure?" window showing exactly what I am about to paste whenever I middle-click-paste anything with a new-line. It can be disabled, but I found I quite like that extra check and would not mind if other applications did that.