Stardate 20010711.1932 (On Screen): Now
this joke was old when
I first learned to use UNIX in 1979. You'd find someone's terminal which was logged in, and type
cd to get to their home directory, and then type
touch \* which would create a file named "*". Someone who was clueless (like, say, an EE) who saw that would reflexively type
rm *. I never did that to anyone but I heard of it being done. But it was destructive so it wasn't really a good practical joke. With the influx of new Linux users, though, I wonder if people are still falling for this 25 year old gag.
(discuss)
