@nixCraft The NTP server was down and I issued:

sudo date <date string>

The correct format including year is MMDDhhmmYYYY, which isn't particularly easy to guess. (I shouldn't have guessed). I did it on a Solaris production server many years ago. It kept rolling for a few minutes while one process after another died. Was interesting to set the correct datetime again.

@nixCraft Some friends once played a mean prank on an admin they didn't like. On his Sun workstation, they created a junk dir with a file named "/etc/passwd", as in, the slashes are in the filename. Normally you can't do that. They hand-edited the disk device to change the filename in the directory. Carelessly trying to rm the file will delete the actual /etc/passwd file. The file is impossible to remove without low-level edit of the fs. (Some versions of fsck will fix the bad filename)

@nixCraft dd if=somefile of=/dev/sdb

Wait, why is *that* disk lighting up?

@nixCraft @catsalad “man kill”

Many moons ago I wrote a perl script that fetched data from multiple locations and processed locally and all files were created in the /tmp/ and there was a bug in tmpfile name creation that caused race conditions. Hours of script run would go to waste until I figured it out all. Not exactly a single command but fixing that bug was as good as coitus 🤣

@nixCraft reBOOt 👻

@nixCraft kill unresponsive childt

@nixCraft :(){ :|:& };: