Shell Programming and Scripting

Well learned that lesson the hard way.

NEVER DELETE ANYTHING AS SUPERUSER WITHOUT TESTING IT OUT FIRST!!

And thanks for the tip.

Yes, if you follow that rule, you will have a much happier life as a system admin.

Also, don't forget an equally important rule:

NEVER WORK ON PRODUCTION (CRITICAL) SYSTEMS AS SUPERUSER WITHOUT A FULL, CURRENT OFF-SERVER BACKUP IN PLACE.

I'm not sure is any such provison exists.

Those files may have not been deleted because they were in use by some other process.Thats's the conclusion that I have reached.

The script went ahead and deleted every in /usr as it selected that as the oldest file as you said earlier.Some files were not deleted because they were in use.

So some files were left behind and most files got deleted.

So maybe the rm command stopped when it tried to remove itself from /usr/bin or stopped working correctly after it removed itself from /usr/bin...

You said three files starting with "r" were left in /usr/bin; remsh was one of them but you didn't say whether rm was one of them.

Just another tip as you probably have heard the "have backups and test thoroughly when working as root" probably often enough now to hit home:

If your "/usr/bin/ls" binary is already missing you can emulate it by using

Code:

echo *

and use the wildcard expansion of the shell instead as a makeshift-ls.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Well it may be as you you said,but i forgot wat the other two files were.I just remember that it started with 'r'.

Thanks for the the tip.But I already copied most of the lost files from other server with same configuration and it seems to be working.