sudo chmod -R 777 /

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Well, I thought it was time for a UNIX humour thread, and my contribution is in the caption line.

Nooo... behave yourself! I had to look up the "-R" for chmod. Sometimes it's "-r", sometimes "-R", sometime either. I just wonder if chmod used is as something like "remove the following permission" - which would have been funny/evil.

I was present when (on a Data General system, IIRC), my boss and the "chief computer operator" did a nice one.

It was a multi-terminal, mainframe system. I was quietly beavering away in another room, when some problems started occurring. I wandered into the computer room to see what was happening. I found the above pair at the system console. They were getting streams of disc errors, followed by things like:

ERROR IN DIRECTORY xyz. SHALL I DELETE DIRECTORY xyz? [Y,N,Q,A]

They were answering "Y" each time. It took two weeks to recover from what they had done.

The actual problem was a damaged head on the disc drive (a big removable disk pack thing). It had started with a smattering of read errors. Subsequently, an engineer was called in, replaced just that head, and all was fine - except for most of the data having been pointlessly deleted and/or corrupted - by the idiots.

Oh! I forgot. My first experience of Unix. Went on a course. Asked "What happens if I do 'rmdir .'?" Was told "No problem, this system is very robust." So I did it. All eight terminals stopped working.

hehe!

ah, good times, vi! pine!

the virus?I cannot type "vim" - I always forget tne "m". Maybe I'll finally get around to symlinking it so I don't have to bother.That's an air freshener scent, isn't it? I hate air fresheners. (What's wrong with "mail" and "talk"?)

I think "chmod -R 000 /" would be better. Then your system will be truly secure.

I was futzing around with Slackware some years back, and I was about to reinstall the system. I decided to see what would happen if I start deleting vital files (stuff in /etc, /sbin). I did an "rm -rf /sbin", and then tried to reboot, both via "reboot", and ctrl-alt-del.

I got this message on the console:
"You don't exist. Go away."

Excellent. Deserved the LOL it got. That made me go read Wikipedia's "Easter egg (virtual)". The "why" command existed in very early Data General machines (not Unix). I wonder which came first. On the DG, it was embedded in the console driver, no less.