Bricking systems using rm

Posted Feb 12, 2016 13:20 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413)
In reply to: Bricking systems using rm by sytoka
Parent article: Bricking systems using rm

Special treatment of leading-dot files is apparently an error in ancient UNIX that became traditional for "hiding" things in the home dir. Basically someone tried to hide .. for issues similar to the ones you are raising, and sloppily hid .everything. The rest is our shared folly thereafter.

Bricking systems using rm

Posted Feb 12, 2016 15:13 UTC (Fri) by roblucid (guest, #48964) [Link]

Sloppy or efficient?
When the whole address space was 32KiB and 1 MIPs was fast, just checking the first character seems like a good feature.

Bricking systems using rm

Posted Feb 13, 2016 20:15 UTC (Sat) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link]

It was 40 years ago today
V6 Unix taught itself to glob,
it's been going in and out of style,
still guaranteed to raise a "huh?"
We're Sgt. Unix's Bastard Offspring OS.