An older friend of mine told me years back about an incident that happened on a university VAX running Unix. In those days, everyone was using vt100 terminals, and the disk drives weren't all that quick. He was working on his own terminal when without warning, he got this error when trying to run a common command (e.g. ls
)
$ ls -l
sh: ls: command not found
So he went on over to the system admin's office, where he found the sysadmin and his assistant, staring at their terminal in frozen horror. Their screen had something like:
# rm -rf / tmp/*.log
^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C
# ls -l
sh: ls: command not found
# stat /bin/ls
sh: stat: command not found
A few seconds after hitting return, and the rm
command not finishing immediately, he realised about the errant space, and then madly hammered Ctrl-C to try to stop it. It turns out that the disk was slow enough that not everything was lost, and by careful use of the commands that hadn't been deleted, managed to copy the executables off another server without having to reinstall the OS.
.rar is an awful proprietary format that needs to die, and die soon. You should NEVER use .rar files when sending files to others due to its closed proprietary nature.
.zip is preferable because everyone can handle it by default. 7z is OK because nearly everyone can handle it by default and it is an open format.