• Atle (unregistered)

    The real WTF is rm * on "bizarre files with unpronounceable names." The globbing will fail if the characters in the file name means the wrong thing to the shell.

    In an otherwise empty folder try: echo "hepp" >-i ls rm *

    Enjoyed the read, though. Especially the description of the key.

  • Mister V (unregistered)

    This is amazing writing. Such fun to read! Kudos to Lorne, I never suspected you had it in you...

  • Atle (unregistered) in reply to Jeff Grigg
    Jeff Grigg:
    Real story: At another company, a naive new developer decided to "clean" the windows directory on his box by renaming it, and then moving back any files he needed. The first step worked.

    ;->

    (We just reinstalled Windows to fix it. There are more subtle ways to recover, but it just wasn't worth it. ;-)

    I don't remember why any more, and I think it was Win 2000, but I wanted to swap around the partitions and the letters. This included temporarily removing c:

    The program for doing this would first let me specify the operations. And the end result would be correct. But once c: was removed, and before it could be set again to the correct partition ... yes, the system was gone.

  • (cs) in reply to Anomaly
    Anomaly:
    TRWTF IS all the comments from the author.

    Yeah, seriously, wtf is up with that?

  • Paul Neumann (unregistered) in reply to jarfil
    jarfil:
    /tmp/bin/mv /tmp/bin /

    Wait, what have I just done?

    Amen. TRWTF: support folk whom do not know how to use the system they support. "But AIX isn't UNIX...": apparently you don't know the basics of either.

  • Clement (unregistered)

    Good read. Good writing. Good theme. Shitty, entitled, whiny comments. Author interaction.

    So it was an all around good time even if I was a day late.

    Day late bonus: all glaring typos were fixed prior to my reading.

  • (cs) in reply to ratchet freak
    ratchet freak:
    he should be glad "bin" is before "tmp" otherwise it would have required a restore from backup

    Backup? What backup? That's TRWTF.

  • J (unregistered)

    The saying is "suffice it to say" not "sufficient to say".

  • (cs) in reply to J
    J:
    The saying is "suffice it to say" not "sufficient to say".

    It's sufficient to say that I'm not doing any more editing on this piece.

  • Val (unregistered)

    How was ls deleted and cp spared? Was the script not working in alphabetical order?

    By the way, why not just copy everything back from the temp directory at once?

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates
    Lorne Kates:
    Nothing's been removed.
    Right, it was just moved to a temp directory. Just like last time.

    (P.S. Knoppix CDs were available both times.)

  • (cs) in reply to Mister V
    Mister V:
    This is amazing writing. Such fun to read! Kudos to Lorne, I never suspected you had it in you...

    I am also agreement with Mister V. this is very nice written piece of article.

  • Tom (unregistered)

    Why is this all white on black ? You realise this makes it impossible to read, right ?

  • (cs) in reply to Tom
    Tom:
    Why is this all white on black ? You realise this makes it impossible to read, right ?

    Hi. Sorry, I can't make out what you wrote. The colours make your comment impossible to read.

  • Bill C. (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates
    Lorne Kates:
    Tom:
    Why is this all white on black ? You realise this makes it impossible to read, right ?
    Hi. Sorry, I can't make out what you wrote. The colours make your comment impossible to read.
    They're not colors. They're shades of grey. Meanwhile I'm still waiting for an intern to give me a trick AND a treat.
  • (cs) in reply to Bill C.
    Bill C.:
    They're not colors. They're shades of grey.

    Black is a neutral-- so is white. They aren't grey at all.

    And on the web, nothing's grey-- it's just an orgy of RGB at various levels.

    So we're both wrong! Yay!

  • (cs) in reply to Nagesh

    OMG Lorne thank you so much!!! My thoughts, in no particular order:

    • It had to take you hours if not days to write that; thank you for your time.

    • The incredible imagery and writing style immediately reminded me of the Lovecraft I read as a kid. It's hard enough writing a story around a technical issue; but to extend that and capture the mood and feeling of a writing style takes real talent.

    • I feel sorry for people who have not read Lovecraft; they've certainly missed out on one of the classic defining genres of American writing.

    • I feel sorry for people who can't handle more than a few lines of text in a story. Life is not always 140 characters or less. Sometimes the good stuff comes only to those who are willing to put in the time and actually read a good story.

    In my mind, this story is the definition of what the TDWTF should be about.

    Those of you looking for just raw WTF should read the RISKS digest.

    Those of you looking for a distraction for a few minutes, thank Lorne for being a contributor.

  • (cs)

    "Brevity is the soul of wit."

  • (cs) in reply to DrPepper
    DrPepper:
    OMG Lorne thank you so much!!! My thoughts, in no particular order:

    =)

  • (cs) in reply to chubertdev
    chubertdev:
    "Brevity is the soul of wit."

    I'LL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL!

  • foxyshadis (unregistered) in reply to Old enough to have been there
    Old enough to have been there:
    b) the USB stick is too new. If it was a CD, 5.25 inch floppy, 1/2 reel to reel mag tape or best 8 inch floppy it would have been more accurate. paper tape and punch cards written in EBCIDIC would have been quite geeky, but too old
    Why? We just decommissioned our AIX server last month, and IBM is still actively trying to sell them to anyone foolish enough to believe their promises. And I still find 10base5 thicknet routed around from time to time, although fortunately the last of that was disconnected almost ten years ago. No one bothers to rip up the remnants of old installations until it's blocking something else.
  • (cs) in reply to Lorne Kates
    Lorne Kates:
    chubertdev:
    "Brevity is the soul of wit."

    I'LL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL!

    This is why I don't read Minecraft or whatever his name is.

  • (cs)

    Amazing. Just out of curiosity - is there any other OS in use today, where it is possible to delete basic system commands?

    Also, from now on, every time when someone asks me why I think UNIX is a joke, I'll just send them a link to this article.

  • Lorian (unregistered)

    Excellent!

    This has to be one of the best-written stories on this site. Thank you! The style was spot-on.

  • Neil (unregistered)

    TRWTF is why the permissions in / allowed the bogus files to be created there in the first place.

  • Bob Howard (unregistered)

    Great article, great read. Thank you.

    Srsly, all you tl;dr l33ts: Do y'all ever read anything more than 140 characters?
    And on the style sheet: Great for Halloween. Eyes hurt? Can you say "vt100"?

    Lastly: Sure, this is Lovecraftian and Poe'd. But no-one's mentioned Stross' Laundry Files?!?

    Captcha: genitus -- where the prostrate is

  • John Max (unregistered)

    a long article to hide the main fact which is YOU SCREWED UP.

    this is what will happen when junior slowly becomes senior without much skill upgrade

  • John Max (unregistered)

    one last thing,

    the author doesnt have the right to bash anyone when he is the one get outwitted.

    in IT, its either u ouwit people, or other people outwit you.

    this article by a loser kinda shames us all professional IT

    P.S: i never been outwitted before. because i do proper risk management

  • (cs) in reply to John Max
    the author doesnt have the right to bash anyone when he is the one get outwitted

    Nah. It's easier to delete the comment and live a life of serene delusion.

  • (cs) in reply to Lorne Kates
    Lorne Kates:
    the author doesnt have the right to bash anyone when he is the one get outwitted

    Nah. It's easier to delete the comment and live a life of serene delusion.

    The key is to trick people into making comments that appear funnier once you manipulate/delete other comments.

    It's the:

    1. I like kittens
    2. Kittens are worse than Hitler
    3. WTF is wrong with you?!?!?! idiot!!!!

    (delete comment 2)

    scenario.

  • Fenn (unregistered)

    Thanks for this piece of writing, even if I wasn't able to read it on Halloween, it was great lovecraftian fun to enjoy later!

    A brief note to people TL;DRing: TRWTF is not that you're lazy guys afraid of reading long text. No, what really baffles me is that you feel necessary to shout it in the comments. Typically the kind of people who don't read documentation because it's too long or because they think that they're smart enough to figure out everything themselves, and who then make the WTF we see there...

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered) in reply to SEMI-HYBRID code
    SEMI-HYBRID code:
    Amazing. Just out of curiosity - is there any other OS in use today, where it is possible to delete basic system commands?
    Windows.

Leave a comment on “The Call of WTF”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article