Unix horror stories

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Tue Aug 29 12:01:24 EDT 2006


On 8/29/06, Tom Buskey <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook

  Indeed.  No system is perfect, and knowing the faults, limitations,
and issues of what you have will help immeasurably.

> It's interesting that most of these horror stories are older.  I don't see
> many that mention Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, (newer) Solaris, etc.

  That file is an "Internet classic".  I think it dates from the early 1990's.

> Are system less error prone?

  HAH!

> Are sysadmins and users making fewer errors?

  Double HAH!

> Are people not sharing thier stories?

  Hmmm, that I don't know.  :-)

  One of my best screw-ups ever: I once accidentally wrote a script
that ended up trying to remove every RPM package from a system.
(Think "rpm --erase *".)  Damned if it didn't try to do it.  The
system actually got about two-thirds of the way through when I noticed
that xterm was filling with complaints like "/usr/bin/perl: No such
file or directory"...

-- Ben



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