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

From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Wed Mar 20 19:32:06 2002

--- Gunther Schadow <gunther_at_aurora.regenstrief.org> wrote:
> 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
>
>


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Movies - coverage of the 74th Academy Awards®
http://movies.yahoo.com/
Received on Wed Mar 20 2002 - 19:32:06 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:35:12 BST