🚀 go-pugleaf

This should be filed under "if you keep your cool you might get out of
shit" stories. Sorry it's Unix specific.

In the early days of Unix in Australia tape drives were scarce and
backups were often done by copying the whole filesystem to a
dismountable pack. Ian Johnstone started to backup a fixed disk with
two filesystems A and B onto pack C and typed

	dd if=A of=C

then mounted a new pack and typed

	dd if=C of=A

Milliseconds after his finger leaves the return key he realizes the
mistake, yells "Oh F***" and hits the DEL key. One scrambled
filesystem. Arrgh!

Fortunately, dd prints out the number of complete and partial blocks
copied when interrupted. So very gingerly, he remounted the first pack
and typed

	dd if=C of=A count=N

Do a ncheck, icheck, etc. (this is before fsck, kids). Breath a deep
sigh of relief.

Years later I had cause to remember that maxim when I typed "tar c"
instead of "tar x". But that story is nowhere as interesting.

I think I'll repost Mario Wolczko's rm -r story next. That one's a
classic.