Well you can do a lot of damage quickly using very short commands. Deleting
the master boot record can be quite effective, but I will demure from
giving specific examples.



On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 3:22 PM, Stuart Yeates <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> > -- Because you can delete everything on the system with a very short
> > command.
>
> This is actually a misconception.
>
> The very short command doesn't delete everything on the system. The
> integrity of files which are currently open (including things like the
> kernel image, executable files for currently-running programs, etc) is
> protected until they are closed (or the next reboot, whichever is first).
> These files vanish from the directory structure on the filesystem but can
> still be accessed by interacting with the running processes which have them
> open (or /proc/ for the very desperate).
>
> This is the POSIX alternative to the windows "That file is currently in
> use" scenario and explains why, when a runaway log file fills up a disk,
> you have to both delete the log file and restart the service to get the
> disk back.
>
> cheers
> stuart
>



-- 
Cary Gordon
The Cherry Hill Company
http://chillco.com