****ing myself laughing at this.

One of the guys in work has just sworn very loudly.

It turns out he had labelled a test file *

When he'd finished with the file hes typed:

rm *

bye bye files

Even more amusing if you create on called -rf too...

Rob.

sounds like a good start for a pc ****-up tread here

I once fitted an additional (new) hard drive and .....

formatted the &^%^& ing wrong drive!

I'm sure cj can add a few confessions here

rm -r * , seen that done once by a sysadmin from /. He didnt realise till it had half wiped out the system including a large chunk of unix.

Time for:

beginner

* insecure with the concept of a terminal

* has yet to learn the basics of vi

* has not figured out how to get a directory

* still has trouble with typing after each line of input

novice

* knows that ls will produce a directory

* use the editor, but calls it vye.

* has heard of C but never used it

* has had his first bad experience with rm

* is wondering how to read his mail

* is wondering why the person next to him seems to like Unix so very much

user

* uses vi and nroff, but inexpertly

* had heard of regular-expr's but never seen one

* uses egrep to search for fixed strings

* has figured out that '-' precedes options

* is wondering how to move a directory

* has attempted to write C program and has decided to stick with pascal

* thinks that sdb is a brand of stereo component

* knows how to read his mail and is wondering how to read the news

knowledgeable user

* uses nroff with no trouble, and is beginning to learn tbl and eqn

* thinks that fgrep is fast grep

* has figured out that mv will move directories

* has learned that learn doesn't help

* somebody has shown him how to write C programs

* once used sed to do some text substitution

* has seen sdb used but does not use it himself

* thinks that make is only for wimps

expert

* uses sed when necessary

* uses macro's in vi, uses ex when necessary

* posts news at every possible opportunity

* writes csh scripts occasionally

* writes C programs using vi and compiles with cc

* has figured out what && and || are for

* thinks that human history started with !h

hacker

* uses sed and awk with comfort

* uses undocumented features of vi

* writes C code with cat > and compiles with !cc

* uses adb because he doesn't trust source debuggers

* can answer questions about the user environment

* writes his own 'nroff' macros to supplement standard ones

* writes scripts for Bourne shell (/bin/sh)

guru

* uses m4 and lex with comfort

* writes assembly code with cat >

* uses adb on the kernel while system is loaded

* customizes utilities by patching the source

* reads device driver source with his breakfast

* can answer any Unix question after a little thought

* uses make for anything that requires two or more distinct commands to archive

* has learned how to breach security, but no longer needs to try

wizard

* writes device drivers with cat >

* fixes bugs by patching the binaries

* can answer any question before ask

* writes his own troff macro packages

* is on first-name basis with Dennis, Bill and Ken

We used to have it pinned up on the wall, years ago

Month end billing stuck for an order...about 6pm

select * from file where order number = 1234 and line = 17

looks good right need to fix that stock allocated field to 0.

update file set stockallocfield = 0 where line = 17

jesus this is taking along time....

3792 records updated...

me>call client done this buggered it up sorry...

client>can anybody ever find out if you fix it?

me> only you and I

client>what are we discussing again?

me>forgotten aswell, I'll just close this call for you.

2hours later I did go home...

Never used sql for an update again, back to good old DFU.

and what happened to "rollback", pray? :P

and what happened to "rollback", pray? :P

That's what I was thinking :confused:

transactional control is an overhead I'm just not willing to deal with...

No rollback on cmdline sql on the as400...live by the sword die by sql.

my most significant change since then is to change my 5250 emulation text to red for when I was working in live environments....purple was test for some reason, isn't purple a sign of some frustration?

Red and yellow for prod.

Green and black for test centre.

Black and white for dev.

Should stop any confusion...

...it doesn't though

I know 'someone' who, while working for a well known PC Seller, wanted to prove to a customer that a UK PC would be OK to use in the US of A, simply by switching the power supply to 115Volts (from UK 240). Although the machine WAS swithched off, I..., I mean he :P, heard a loud POP when the machine voltage was switched.

Yep, it was still connected to the mains

PC W**** were OK about it, they just sent it back to the manufacturer as faulty.

Hey, he was only a 2nd year at Uni, Studying Computer Science at the time

Rich

Never really messed up a PC from the software side too bad.

In my previous job, working for a small company who built up and sold PCs, I turned up one morning, with a slight hangover and a customer's PC in the van. As usual, I took the base unit out of the van and swung it up to my shoulder to balance whilst locking the doors. Sadly, my "swing" was actually a "hurl" and I turned round in time to see the PC bouncing off along the pavement...

All was fixed eventually... after smuggling the dented PC into work and finding an identical case on an old machine to swap over...

when Ghost first came out an engineer was upgrading a HDD and ghost'd it the wrong way.... all data gone

am i the only one that is absolutely and totally lost by most of this thread. i know dos and windows amd how to play ps2/x-box. so i'm happy

Formatting a disc isn't all that bad usually, ghosting is tho

(esp. the wrong way, hehe).

The real killer in W9x days was deltree - deltree /y c:\ would blow away everything very, very quickly, and unlike the unformat you get with format with those Windowz versions, you cannot recover that one (except for manually editing the FAT)

Most of the failure I have to deal with are registry corruptions, caused by overheating CPUs (fan failure not detected in time).

I have seen a spectacular printer explosion when we had a US printer over to the UK at (a few jobs ago) my job then. Some guy plugged it into the 240V rather than the moving transformer

Laser printers sure go with a bang, and smoke, and a lot of plastic appeared to have just disappeared,

In uni we used to enjoy blowing up lightbulbs, car bulbs, the old round ones, stick them on a 220V mains

They either turned bright and then vaporised the figment, or exploded

Capacitors are great too if you stand well-back They always explode

Soz showing my history of 'troubleshooter' hehehehe

No rollback on cmdline sql on the as400...live by the sword die by sql.

When ever I'm changing files I always back them up, just in case. I've not used SQL on the 400, Good ol' DBU and DFU for me...

Someone here did a classic a few weeks ago. They were working on a project to backup all the spoolfiles as we need to keep them for 8 years. He moves them to an outq to be backed up, but Goes home for the weekend without backing them up. The system deletes spoolfiles that are older than 3 days if they aren't in special outq's. Comes back on Monday, 14000 spoolfiles missing :eek:. I'm surprised he's still working here.

Capacitors are great too if you stand well-back They always explode

I remember getting a hardware engineer to look at one of those old fashioned line printers when I first started at this place. It wasn't going. He opened the lid' date=' peered in, poked something (maybe pushed the print head a little) and BANG!! an enormous capacitor blew up in his face. Little shreds of paper went up in a big cloud like a duck hit by a shotgun blast. I swear his face was all black when he reeled back from the printer - like the wily Coyote. We laughed when we'd settled down a bit. He was lucky not to get anything in his eyes. The capacitor was about 4 inches high by 1 1/2 round. Boy was it loud!

We used have a boss with a dicky ticker when I was an apprentice and we used to try to finish him off with the old exploding capacitor trick.

When we left at night we'd tunr the power off to the workshop and connect a capacitor to a power supply with the polarity reversed then lock up and go home.

Boss would get in first in the morning and turn the power . IF we set it up right the capacitor would explode just as was switching the lights on:D