John Kebbel wrote:
> My original posting for Re: rmdir when directory is not empty began...
> "The man page for rmdir left more questions than it answered." I cropped
> that line out of my email so I could get straight to the point. Now that
> I know we have a vocal RTFM crowd here, I'll make sure I NEVER again
> forget to mention I read the man first.
Um. I've never seen any "RTFM" on the list in the sense of "you're an
idiot: you should have looked here". It's always been "here's how you
find documentation: you might find this useful" and/or "here's the
documentation if you want to read up further", or perhaps "here's
documentary evidence from something a little more authoritative than
some random bloke wibbling on a mailing list".
The last point *is* important. For one thing, it's possible that someone
might miss something vitally important [1]. There are areas of the
Internet where "rm -rf /" is an old joke ("how to manage Xenix", for
example). And there's recently been concern that one of the easiest ways
for someone to get root on a random Linux box might be to hang out on
the appropriate mailing list and give support "suggestions" that don't
make it to the list.
See http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/164152/4269755b381d07c3/ for example.
James.
[1] For example, the AIX "support" several years back, while I was away
on holiday and the machine had a tape problem. "Support" decided we
needed to reload the machine and go back to the old database backup
(remember, we'd had tape problems, so that wasn't particularly recent).
"Support" couldn't read the first line of the mksysb manpage:
Creates an installable image of the root volume group
and understand that there might realistically be *more than one* volume
group on a machine, and that the database might not be part of the
rootvg they'd just restored.
I got phoned the night I got back from Paris by my co-workers, just in
time to save the database which had been happily sitting on the datavg
all the time.
--
E-mail address: james | Remember, half-measures can be very effective if
@westexe.demon.co.uk | all you deal with are half-wits.
