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Comment by hernan7 | Hacker News Reader

I still remember my "rm -fr /" episode after almost 20 years. It was slightly different, something related to chmod'ing some files under /etc on an AIX server:

   $ cd /etc
   $ chmod 600 some_file * # instead of some_file.*

oops... Thank God for boot diskettes.

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I was playing with FUSE, and had managed to mount a loopback filesystem. And then, for some ill-considered reason, I tried to delete the directory that I had mounted it inside.

I managed to Ctrl-C it before it ate any files in /home, but I still had some nasty cleanup work to get the computer back in working order again. Thank god for LiveCDs.

In the same spirit, I once removed a chroot tree, forgetting I bind mounted /etc into it.

It took me half a day to recover from that.

Another one, even more stupid, is to recover a "backup" of /var, done without the proper rights to it. I noticed the problem after a lot of weirds errors cropping in. This one I did not recover - after a few hours, I ended up deciding that reinstalling linux on my machine would be faster and more reliable.

I've found it's useful to look through the man pages of commonly-used tools for an option to prevent traversing filesystems.

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