Let's say I want to check out the assembler code that gcc is generating: gcc -S program.c > program.s And now your system is eating itself in front of your very eyes.īut again I think stuff like overwriting my precious code files with garbage, because I messed up one character or because I mixed up the order of parameters, is more trouble. But if you read somewhere that with 'sudo -i' you will never again have to type in sudo you are logged in as root now. Well if you omit the dot, it will start moving all your files. Let's accept the fact that you learned to use. If you want an example of a one character mix up that will crash your system take a look at this scenario: You want to move all the files in the current directory to another one: mv -f. And frankly with most command line utilities.

Similar mix ups can happen with archive utils. Well if you mix those up (switch if and of), it will overwrite the fresh data with old data, no questions asked. Suppose you don't know what your doing and attempting to do a backup of some hard drive dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/disk2