[TriLUG] A funny thing happened

[M. Mueller (bhu5nji)]

I needed to read a .pdf last night on my Mandrake 8.1 laptop.  The installed 
viewer (PS and PDF Viewer under Applications-Publishing) displayed blank 
pages for a known good .pdf document.

So, I downloaded Acrobat 4.05 for Linux.  (I've done this before on a RH 6.1 
machine with no problems.)  I tried to install to my user account.  No luck.  
It couldn't find "ed".  I RPMed ed into the machine.  Install of Acrobat then 
asked where to install, so I replied "~/Acrobat".  ( I was in 
~/acrobat-install when I gave the reply; I meant to reply with "./Acrobat")  
The installer created "~/acrobat-install/~/Acrobat".  To make a long story 
short - things did not work out.  I decided to blow away the Acrobat install. 
I did "ls" on the ~/acrobat-install dir and saw the ./~ directory.  I entered 
the following command:

rm -fr ~

Here's the funny part.  I meant to enter:

rm -fr ./~

"Golly," I thought to myself as I began to fully appreciate what that command 
had gone and done, "that sure is a powerful command."  It had completely 
erased my user directory contents.  I was laughing at my mistake while I 
reloaded MDK8.1 twice and setup my mail accounts again.  I reloaded twice 
because I fat-fingered the DNS address during the first install.  I tried to 
fix it by editing files in /etc/* but I kept changing a bad address to 
another bad address.  Boy...I really got a chuckle out of that.

Well, everything's back to normal now.  I really didn't need all that old 
email I'd been saving.  Now I even have Xpdf that really does read a .pdf.  
Why it came in on this install, and not the first one, I'll never know.

I was also left wondering why Acrobat installed OK on one machine and not 
another.  Oh, well.  Xpdf seems to work just fine.

Mike M.