fault toleratant shell scripts

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:
...
>So when the cd /lost+found failed, the following command
>rm -r * was performed on / with the resultant anguish.

One of the more interesting bugs I found was on the old Radio Shack Model
16 Xenix systems.  If one was at the ``/'' directory and typed ``lpr *'',
the printing routines actually linked all the directories under root under
/usr/spool/lpd (I may have the print command and directory wrong as it's
been years since I ran Xenix).  Needless to say it didn't print very well,
but if one attempted an ``rm -r /usr/spool/lpd/*'' it removed everything on
the system.  The only workaround I found was to rename the print spool
directory, and make a new directory.

At least in those days, reinstalling Xenix only required about three eight
inch floppies for the base system and took about 20 minutes.

Bill
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