Ultrix' /etc/crontab as a time-bomb [short joke].

From: Gunther Schadow <gunther_at_aurora.regenstrief.org>
Date: Wed Mar 20 17:05:39 2002

Hihi, our little training in risk-assessment tonight is the following
sippet of a crontab entry, scheduled to run dayly around midnight:

(cd /usr/preserve ; find . -mtime +7 -a -exec rm -f {} \;)

why is this a bad idea and what happened to me last night as I was
playing with my VAX6460?















































Answer: the /usr/preserve was a symlink to /usr/var/preserve which
didn't exist. What happened next?














































All files that were not accessed for more than 7 days were being deleted (and
I basically installed this system 3 days ago but had fast forwarded my system
time from 1976 to 2002 the day before. :-)



-- 
Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D.                    gschadow_at_regenstrief.org
Medical Information Scientist      Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
Adjunct Assistant Professor        Indiana University School of Medicine
tel:1(317)630-7960                         http://aurora.regenstrief.org
Received on Wed Mar 20 2002 - 17:05:39 GMT

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