fault toleratant shell scripts

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 12:30:52AM -0500, Ward Griffiths wrote:
> On Monday 15 March 2004 01:36 pm, Bill Vermillion wrote:
> > And you didn't remove everything in the system.  Since could could
> > not remove the directory you were in, the only thing it left
> > was the /usr/spool/lpd/<whatever> loop as it tried to descend
> > furhter and further.  It was just like a hoop snake in that
> > respect.  [If you reember the stories of the hoop snake from your
> > youth]
> 
> /bin/rm (and /bin itself, naturally) would also remain.  Tested that 
> once on a store demo I was cleaning up for a fresh OS install for a 
> customer delivery -- did an rm -f * from / then mounted and looked at 
> the HD from a boot floppy just for grins.  Then I formatted it.

Wimp. 

*I* did it on a live system.

16B, Xenix 3, Real World.

# cd /error/in/path/name
cd: path not found
# rm -rf .
rm: you friggin' idiot
...

Got it stopped after a couple *minutes*.  It ate a *lot* of stuff.
But, amazingly, not so much that a) the users stopped being able to
work or b) we were unable to back the data up and reload from the prior
night and restore.

I *was* on site until something like 0130...

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida        http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

        "They had engineers in my day, too."  -- Perry Vance Nelson