CommitStrip | website
Transcript
7 panel comic
1: [2 guys, both in fur lined coats, one wearing a fur-lined hat, the other with crazy hair, sit in circular booth in a rundown bar. 2 empty shot glasses and a bottle are visible on the table.]
Hat: Stop it, you’re crazy! This isn’t you talking, it’s the vodka!
Hair: Leave it…
2: [The two men are sitting across from a third man in a similar fur-line coat and hat, but glasses and a beard. A laptop sits in front of the bearded man.]
Beard: It’s not a game for cowards…
3: [Hair pulls the laptop towards him. Hat looks worried]
Hair: Come on, gimme that and let’s get it over with!
4: [Hair has a crazy and excited look on his face]
Hair: Each one on his own prod server?
Beard: Each one on his own prod server.
5: [Close up of Hats finger clicking the touch pad]
6: [Close up of the sweat dripping down Hats face]
7: [A terminal is open on the laptop screen]
Laptop reads:
root@server:~# [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo “Lucky boy”;


And also a short delay before printing ‘lucky boy’ so you can’t tell if it’s deleting everything or if it’s the built in delay.
Oh I do remember that sickening feeling when an
rmdoesn’t come back immediately –_—I still remember when I managed to rm -rf / foo (I accidentally typed a space between / and foo) on my very early linux box on the 90s. 80486, 16 mb
I pressed enter. Saw what I did. Remembered that sync ran at every 30s* Pressed the power button.
*= those were simple times, but not better times
So I rm -rf ed my root fs and my box survived it due to the quick power off.
What’s sync? I got into linux quite a bit later. So you mean like an incremental rsync backup? Whatever it was, it sounds like it saved you.
it was an old mechanism in Unix & Linux that flushed “disk writes” to disk. Writes would normally go to the buffer cache in ram and a process called “sync” every 30s to flush out writes to disk. (writing out EVERY change would result in a lot of redundant writes and be very slow, so this was a very simple kind of collecting work until it makes sense to really do it)
We still write async writes to ram first and then write them to disk later, the mechanism is much more advanced nowadays - and also quicker to start writing.
Still, on the shell there’s a command called sync which invokes the system call, asking the kernel to flush out all asynchronous writtes.
(And yes, there’s more than async writes, used by databases for example, but that would require a lot more of explanations)
That’s brilliant…and sick.