Re: Help with shell script

[James Gibbon <james gibbon virgin net>]

Michael Gargiullo wrote:

> find / -mtime +2 -type d -exec rm -rf \{} \;
> 
> I wonder how long that will run before it eats itself?  Hasn't
> anyone wanted to do that just to see...

A system administrator colleague of mine did effectively exactly
that, a few years ago, on a production Solaris mail server in an
investment bank. The variable representing the directory to run the
find from had become assigned to / thanks to a bug in his script
(run from cron, as root).

I remember it quite well, because I was on call at the time, and 
awoken in the early hours of one Monday morning to fix it.