3 ms·

The worst unix disaster ever? Could you elaborate for non-unix people such as myself?

• smwht 12y ago
  The important character here is the '>'. This redirects output to a file and overwrites the file. The lrwxrwxrwx will only print an error, but the redirect to the target executable will erase the target. For example: $ echo "asdf" > foo $ cat foo asdf $ lrwxwrwxrwx 1 root root -> foo lrwxrwxrwx: command not found $ cat foo $ So basically, this zero'd out every executable on the system.
  • talmand 12y ago
    Yep, that's bad. Out of curiosity, what was the solution to fix all that?
    • mianosm 12y ago
      Possibly a cp or an scp from a remote system with a working set of binaries.
    • kstenerud 12y ago
      scp was in /usr/bin, so we could at least copy enough basics from another system and recover the rest from a backup. Needless to say we lost the client contract.