UNIX Recovery Legend
Have you ever left your terminal logged in, only to find when you came back to it that a (supposed) friend had typed "rm -rf ~/*" and was hovering over the keyboard with threats along the lines of «lend me a fiver 'til Thursday, or I hit return»? Undoubtedly the person in question would not have had the nerve to inflict such a trauma upon you, and was doing it in jest. So you've probably never experienced the worst of such disasters....
It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday, 1st October, 15:15 BST, to be precise, when Peter, an office-mate of mine, leaned away from his terminal and said to me, "Mario, I'm having a little trouble sending mail." Knowing that msg was capable of confusing even the most capable of people, I sauntered over to his terminal to see what was wrong. A strange error message of the form (I forget the exact details) "cannot access /foo/bar for userid 147" had been issued by msg. My first thought was "Who's userid 147?; the sender of the message, the destination, or what?" So I leant over to another terminal, already logged in, and typed
When I arrived at his office, his door was ajar, and within ten seconds I realised what the problem was. James, our manager, was sat down, head in hands, hands between knees, as one whose world has just come to an end. Our newly-appointed system programmer, Neil, was beside him, gazing listlessly at the screen of his terminal. And at the top of the screen I spied the following lines:
