OT: My Mac,My Older Brother,and some scotch

[Psychicpet]

OK, so myself and my two little nuggets are out here in lovely freezing cold Alberta with some gorgeous snow visiting 'Nan' and 'Papa' for a few days (and giving my missus and much deserved break from us all) anywho, my big bro works with computers for a profession and as such knows much more than his own good. So we're lookin' to see if I've got my 'dashboard' display set-up sooo...he's goes into this nifty lookin' little window that resembles a DOS window and types some crap to no avail and then he niftily types something to the effect of " rf-rm* " or something like that and then says, "press enter" ....so I did.... to which he said he was only joking because what I had just done was wipe part of my hard drive clean............... includingreg.'s and cert.'s for ProTools.....................

so you might ask why I mentioned scotch in the title...well, that's what led to the " rf-rm* " tag in the firrst place, anywho, I guess no remote recording this trip.


ahh.... Darg, you ever pull anything like that? or get that pulled on you??

 

[tkarter]

rm -rf *

UNIX remove recursively force everything.

If done from the / you have destroyed your OS.

If done from inside a directory it empties the directory.


tk

 

[phatduckk]

no ... LoL

dont use the terminal dude

in all seriousness, that sucks dude

 

[phatduckk]

rm -rf *

UNIX remove recursively force everything.

If done from the / you have destroyed your OS.

If done from inside a directory it empties the directory.


tk

well, not entirely true ... you shouldnt have permission to delete "important stuff". if you wanna delete those too you've gotta run sudo rm -rf /

 

[tkarter]

You are right.

I think if my brother done something like that to my computer and told me to hit enter he probably wouldn't like me much after all was said and done.


tk

 

[maddog]

What tom said. To further explain:

rm = remove

-r = recursive

-f = force

* = wildcard identifier

So "rm -rf *" means to remove everything in the current directory and all sub directories regardless of permissions.

If you are familiar with UNIX, the terminal is your friend. If not, well...

 

[Mobay45]

Hey Pete!

When's your brother's funeral and where should we send the flowers?

 

[maddog]

well, not entirely true ... you shouldnt have permission to delete "important stuff". if you wanna delete those too you've gotta run sudo rm -rf /

Pete, your brother didn't give you root privileges I hope?

 

[tkarter]

Desktop Movies Public
Documents Music Sites
Downloads Network Trash Folder TheVolumeSettingsFolder
Library Pictures


That is a paste of what would you could remove in the terminal using the rm command.

That would be everything in your home folder. You own it and can remove it.

From some aspects you may as well have root access and try the from /



tk

 

[Squozen]

Good to see we have some Mac owners on the forum... sucks that some of them have idiots for siblings.

 

[Psychicpet]

ya, having much fun i think we did do it from just inside a directory and only cacked it 'cause i still do have alot of stuff left BUT it's not entirely bad. the worst is that i lost all my palm daytimer/contacts stuff which had lesson scheduling and which students have paid for how many lessons and what not but that'll be easy enough to remedy. More or less just a good story and some good leverage to get some stuff out of my bro.

 

[phatduckk]

Pete, your brother didn't give you root privileges I hope?

na, on mac you cant just su without doing some tricky stuff ... they make you run sudo xxx ... or you could just sudo bash and you can run a new terminal session as root

 

[maddog]

na, on mac you cant just su without doing some tricky stuff ... they make you run sudo xxx ... or you could just sudo bash and you can run a new terminal session as root

I know su, what's sudo? I haven't really played with the UNIX much on my mac. Mainly know my UNIX from working with IRIX at work.

 

[Psycho Ward]

“What in the wide, wide world of sports is a going on here?” What kind a funny talk is all this… or I could be drunk… wait forget this post…

 

[maddog]

wait forget this post…

No can do, pardner.

 

[tkarter]

What is your apple tech ID duck?

I know sudo and su.

tk

 

[phatduckk]

What is your apple tech ID duck?

tk

i dunno what that is ... i got a mac about a year ago and have experience with unix etc, so i just pretend its linux and most stuff works the way i expect

 

[midopa]

I only know sudoku. Am I a bad computer engineering student?

 

[phatduckk]

I know su, what's sudo? .

its executes a command as superUser ...

so "apachectl restart" should restart you web server ... normal users shouldnt have permission to do this. so to execute that command as su (a user with sufficient privileges) you can type "sudo apachectl restart"

 

[Colin]

you guy's are starting to sound a lot like nerds