I used to be Tech Support Manager for a small Unix systems house. At one point, one of my co-workers got sent to make some changes on a Unix system we had sold to a customer.
Unix systems have a userid called "root", also known as "super user". It's equivalent to, but even more powerful than Administrator privileges in Windows. Root has all power to do anything, and can shoot a system in the foot with a misplaced keystroke.
My guy had a bad habit I complained about, picked up while administering a small Xenix system: he
always ran as root, to avoid pesky permissions problems. So when he got to the customer site, the first thing he did was use the menu driven system admin utility to create himself a userid with root privileges. He used that ID to make his changes. He then used the system administration utility to remove the ID.
What he
didn't know was that on
that model of the vendor's machine, unlike the one we had in the office, when you used the menu driven system administration utility to remove a userid, it not only removed the userid. It removed the user's home directory, and all directories beneath it.
The ID was a duplicate of root, and the home directory was "/". You guessed it: he completely wiped the file system on the machine.
He then had to reload Unix from the distribution media, and restore from complete tape backup the customer had (thank God!) made before he arrived, and then re-do his changes, while trying to keep the customer's very bright and inquisitive rep who was watching the entire time from realizing exactly what he had just done. (The client was a doctor's office. The system was keeping medical and billing records. Oh, my)
When he finally got back to the office and confessed what happened, all I could say was "
Now do you understand why I don't like you always running as root? I bet you'll never do
that again,
right?"
______
Dennis