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What's the spookiest thing at your Linux terminal?

Zombies and daemons and files from the crypt, does your Linux terminal have the Halloween spirit?
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Spider web

What's the most frightening thing in your terminal?

102 votes tallied
$ cat black_cat_crossing_my_path.txt
11 votes
$ mcrypt all_my_passwords.txt
21 votes
$ killall zombie-processes
35 votes
$ systemctl start wailing-daemon.service
21 votes
### Insert another bad pun here.
14 votes

For those who live in a part of the world that celebrates it, Happy Halloween! May the only creepy-crawly bugs you encounter today be a part of your spooky decorations at home, and not a part of a production server at work.

Halloween has always been a big deal here at Red Hat, dating back to the October 31 release of our first Linux distribution way back in 1994. It's also the time of year we host We Are Red Hat Week, a celebration of our unique open source culture. While in a normal year this would include lots of in person festivities, this year we're all remote, but here's a look back at our celebration from last year.

I won't claim to be the first person who has thought about spooky Linux commands, and I probably won't be the last, either. There's a lot more than what we listed in this poll, of course.

So which one of these is the spookiest to me? It's hard to say. rm -rf / --no-preserve-root comes to mind as something that gives me the shivers more than any of these.

Topics:   Poll   Sysadmin culture  
Author’s photo

Jason Baker

Red Hat Certified Engineer. Linux desktop enthusiast. Map/geospatial nerd. Raspberry Pi tinkerer. Data analysis and visualization geek. Occasional Pythonista. More about me

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