[ale] Stoopid Noobs

[JK]

Christopher Fowler wrote:

>Lets get another thread going.
>
>When I first did Linux in the early 90s I needed to copy a file from
>Linux to Windows.  /dev/hda1 was Windows partition.  Here is how I did
>it:
>
>cat file > /dev/hda1
>
>My next step was to reinstall Win 3.11 and then load my backup off of
>floppy tape.  Never tried that again.
>  
>
Sometime in 1990-1991, on my very first Linux 0.xx system, in
a misguided attempt to achieve some goal I've long forgotten, I
did "rm -rf /usr". Which eventually got around to deleting the
"rm" executable, and chaos ensued. (That wouldn't happen today,
I don't think, but back then paging worked quite differently.)

It gets better.  I was completely confused by this behavior, since
I didn't know that "rm" was a separate executable, not a shell
builtin, so I posted a message to the Linux mailing list asking WTF
was up.  Linus himself replied, explaining to me that I was
an idiot.

Good times....

-- JK