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

From: Paul Thompson <thompson_at_mail.athenet.net>
Date: Wed Mar 20 19:30:04 2002

Mine has this too, did you not have a /usr/preserve?
Otherwise it would just kill your vi journal file.

On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, Gunther Schadow wrote:

> Hihi, our little training in risk-assessment tonight is the following
> sippet of a crontab entry, scheduled to run dayly around midnight:
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> (cd /usr/preserve ; find . -mtime +7 -a -exec rm -f {} \;)
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> why is this a bad idea and what happened to me last night as I was
> playing with my VAX6460?
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> Answer: the /usr/preserve was a symlink to /usr/var/preserve which
> didn't exist. What happened next?
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> 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. :-)
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-- 
Received on Wed Mar 20 2002 - 19:30:04 GMT

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