I accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.
I went on to rm -rv ~/etc, but I quickly typed rm -rv /etc instead, and hit enter, while using a root account.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
    2·
    8 hours ago

    Accidents Will Happen

    If Dennis and Ken had a Selectric instead of a Teletype, we’d probably be typing “copy” and “remove” instead of “cp” and “rm.”

    Proof again that technology limits our choices as often as it expands them. After more than two decades, what is the excuse for continuing this tradition? The implacable force of history, AKA existing code and books. If a vendor replaced rm by, say, remove, then every book describing Unix would no longer apply to its system, and every shell script that calls rm would also no longer apply. Such a vendor might as well stop implement-ing the POSIX standard while it was at it.

    A century ago, fast typists were jamming their keyboards, so engineers designed the QWERTY keyboard to slow them down. Computer key-boards don’t jam, but we’re still living with QWERTY today.

    A century from now, the world will still be living with rm.

      • ne0phyte@feddit.org
        2·
        1 hour ago

        Qwerty was developed so that typewriter hammers have a low chance of hitting each other and get stuck. It was never about finger travel or ergonomics.

        PCs adapted the layout and unfortunately we stuck with it ever since. There are many better layouts, some more extreme in terms of difference to qwerty, some just fix the most blatant problems. Colemak and Dvorak for example.

      • clif@lemmy.world
        3·
        8 hours ago

        On mechanical typewriters the little arms that slap the steel letters onto the ink ribbon/paper could get physically jammed. QWERTY was designed to make it so that was less likely to happen by placing the keys in an order that discouraged it.

        At least, that’s the way I learned it.

        Source: trust me bro