D on Slashdot

H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed Jan 21 10:01:44 PST 2015


On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 09:06:50AM +0200, ketmar via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Jan 2015 22:43:04 -0800
> "H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d" <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> 
> > I almost nuked my entire system with a mistyped `rm -rf` command, as
> > I'm sure every *nix person has at least once in his life
> my expirience was simply doing `chmod -R 600 /` as root. lucky me. and
> i really hate that person who placed '.' and '/' next to each other.

Mistyping a recursive rm command is a relatively easy mistake, but there
are worse things than that. One time, an OS upgrade gone wrong left me
with my entire filesystem intact, but with a broken, non-functional ld.

...

which meant *nothing* can run, because ld is called to dynamically link
in libc, etc., for just about *everything* on the system. So, no rm, no
ls, no mv, no chmod, etc., etc.. This was on a remote server, too, and
the only connection to the box that I had left was just the last ssh
bash session to the box. One mistake, and it's bye-bye server. :-P  To
recover from that, I had to do this:

	http://eusebeia.dyndns.org/bashcp

It was the most intense few hours, I tell ya, when I had to rescue the
system from the brink of reinstallation from scratch back to a
functioning system without losing any data.

Now try that on Windows. :-D


> ah, and once i accidentally did dd the wrong way and rewrote my
> harddrive with contents of flash pen.

Ouch!

On a lighter note, one time I almost peed my pants when, after
installing a major OS upgrade, I rebooted and got a kernel panic. (I
also made the mistake of having no backup boot media, so there was no
other way to get into the system to fix things.) I thought something
serious had gone wrong with the upgrade, but fortunately, it turned out
that the problem was that I had previously moved my main OS installation
to a non-default root (/dev/sdc1 instead of the usual /dev/sda1), but
had forgotten to update the bootloader to point to the new root (and
didn't notice 'cos Linux tends to just run forever, so it was like 6
months later before this problem finally reared its ugly head). So when
the kernel came up it tried to mount root from /dev/sda1 and couldn't,
it panicked.  Rebooting with the root=/dev/sdc1 parameter saved the day.
:-P


> > In many ways it's like D... in spite of all its niggling little
> > problems, once I tasted the power of D, I just can't go back to
> > C/C++ anymore. I used to take pride in being the resident C/C++
> > guru, but nowadays, doing C/C++ is like scratching on chalkboard.
> > I'll do it if I have to (my employer pays me to do it, so I tolerate
> > it), but I'd never do it again voluntarily. D has ruined my life; I
> > just can't do C/C++ anymore. :-P
>
> it's almost the same for me. i hate alot of small things in D (that's
> why i'm so passioned about them), but i just can't return to C/C++
> anymore! it's like going back to MS-DOS. ;-) despite all annoyances D
> managed to get the main thing right -- thanks to all people that made
> it possible.

+1.


T

-- 
I see that you JS got Bach.


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list