removing all files with extreme prejudice

[Andy Wardley]

Simon Burr wrote:
> Still, there are some interesting war stories out there of how to recover
> from an accidently rm -rf / as root; the best probably being:
>   http://www.justpasha.org/folk/rm.html

Back in the day we had an old ICL DRS6000 which needed a fresh OS install.
So just for laughs, a bunch of us sat down and watched what really happens
when you do run rm -rf / as root.

It was rather interesting (in an admittedly geeky way) to see how an
operating system eats itself from the inside out.  All sorts of interesting
errors started getting thrown up as critical libraries and other files
disappeared.  The details are fuzzy, but I seem to recall it eventually
got itself caught up in an infinite tizzy with the virtual memory manager.

Must try it again sometime...

A