Dumb things to do with your FreeBSD

Serious proposal: The mount command should refuse to work if there is anything in the directory that is going to become the mount point. Or the mount point (directory) must not exist yet, and is temporarily created by the mount command, and vanishes again after umount. Either would prevent these common mistakes.
 
ralphbsz said:
What's wrong with that? I have that on all my FreeBSD systems (except I don't use cash, I edit /etc/passwd with vipw).
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If you fatfinger something fundamental ports you can no longer log in as root. There is bash-static.
 
cracauer@ said:
If you fatfinger something fundamental ports you can no longer log in as root. There is bash-static.
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Yes, but I can log in as toor, and I have another account called rootsh. And I can reboot as single user. I think the fear of using a root shel that's not statically linked and installed from base is overblown on modern systems. In the days when a typical Unix machine had a half dozen disks attached, and / was on a different disk from /usr and from /var and so on, it was plausible that a machine had to keep running with some of the fundamental file systems damaged.

And sometime in the last few years, we actually had an episode where bash became broken (my logs say it happened with bash 5.2_3 and involved bash handling locale incorrectly). Didn't require a reboot, only logging in with account root and undoing the pkg upgrade (fortunately, the old version was still in the pkg cache).
 
The general wisdom is that you use bash with toor and /bin/tcsh for root. Interesting that you do it the other way around!

(I said tcsh becaue I still use it for root. I agree with most people in that sh is just terrible for interactive use).
 
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