How not to impress your sysadmin

[sawyl]

Here's just one way to totally nark your sysadmin: make all your files world writable and then bitch when one of your colleagues runs a brain dead, super broken script that does an rm -Rf $UNSET_VARIABLE/, does a delete on everything from the root directory down and trashes them all. You can, of course, make up for this act of shocking incompetence in the eyes of your system wrangler by interrupting them when they're in the middle of hauling stuff back from tape to explain why you're a special case, why you absolutely positively have to leave a bunch of writable stuff lying around and why it's not the result of lazy design on your part. Yeah, that ought to soothe any frayed nerves and put you back in your admin's good books.

Does all that sound like too much work? Well, why not try a simpler approach: just run an rm -Rf / to see what it does. I bet it won't do all that much damage. I mean, it's not like you're root or anything, so it's not like anything really bad could happen...

I swear, next time I do a serious system installation, I'm going to configure an impossibly fascist MLS regime that makes it totally impossible for such things to happen, one that makes it totally impossible for users to log on, create any files, submit any jobs, stuff like that...