this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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An older friend of mine told me years back about an incident that happened on a university VAX running Unix. In those days, everyone was using vt100 terminals, and the disk drives weren't all that quick. He was working on his own terminal when without warning, he got this error when trying to run a common command (e.g.
ls
)So he went on over to the system admin's office, where he found the sysadmin and his assistant, staring at their terminal in frozen horror. Their screen had something like:
A few seconds after hitting return, and the
rm
command not finishing immediately, he realised about the errant space, and then madly hammered Ctrl-C to try to stop it. It turns out that the disk was slow enough that not everything was lost, and by careful use of the commands that hadn't been deleted, managed to copy the executables off another server without having to reinstall the OS.Oh no, that's horrifying.