What’s the most disturbing, scary linux or unix command you’ve seen or executed ever?
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@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?
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 25 (?) years ago I wrote a perl script to download Dilbert comic to a tmp folder and email it to me as an attachment. Around the ten year mark I realised that the script never removed the tmp files. So now I have about 25 years of Dilbert comics. (Until the time that Scott revealed his true personality).
@nixCraft kill unresponsive childt
@nixCraft :(){ :|:& };:
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