Assigning ROOT a password. WAS: Re: Graphical Display Managers

[Derek Broughton]

Michael Leone wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 10:19 AM, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca>
> wrote:
>> Michael Leone wrote:
>>
>>  > You just have to be careful, that's all. Of course, even if you don't
>>  > assign root a password, you have to be careful you don't do something
>>  > like "sudo rm -rf /*.*", too. :-) That'll mess up your whole day ...
>>
>>  There are less obvious ways:
>>
>>  $ cd /etc
>>  ...
>>  $ sudo rm -r /home/derek/something *
>>
>>  Whatever "something" was, it was a directory I'd accidentally created
>>  under
>>  sudo, so I needed to use sudo to delete it.  Unfortunately there was
>>  supposed to be a / between "something" and "*".  Oops.  Bye-bye /etc/*!
> 
> D'OH!
> 
> A very good point, that hadn't occurred to me. makes you think that
> having a prompt whenever you do a "rm -rf", as an extra measure, might
> not be a bad idea.

Well, you can never protect everybody from their own stupidity - or even
clumsiness :-)  I think we'd mostly just find this sort of thing annoying
(besides which, -f is used to ensure we don't get prompted).

-- 
derek