rm -rf

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Nov 09, 2006, Man-wai CHANG wrote:
>Net Llama! wrote:
>> http://www.justpasha.org/folk/rm.html
>> 
>
>Back then, was there regular expression? I meant the "*"...

The ``*'' here is a shell expansion, not a regular expression,
and, yes, they've been arounc *nix systems forever.

FWIW:  There was an ``intersting'' bug in Xenix on the Radio
Shack Model 16s when it was first released in 1982.  If one typed
the command ``lp *'' in the root directory, it would actually
link all the root-level directories under the /usr/spool/lp
directory (yeah I know you're not supposed to be able to make
hard links of directories).  Then of one executed a command like
``rm -rf /usr/spool/lp/*'' it would happily remove the entire
system.  The Radio Shack Xenix was Microsoft's port of UNIX to
the Motorola 68000.

Bill
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