Man accidentally 'deletes his entire company' with one line of bad code

[stek]

No mention of who this person is, which forum, when it happened, any details of the location, any shred of evidence any of that is true.

Is the Indepenent the new CUK?

Apparently he's called Marco Marsala and googleable as is his company. I can't be arsed though.

[NickFitz]

This would never have happened with Windows.

IT equivalent of the darwin awards.

Back in the 1980s, working on an Amstrad PC1512 with twin floppy drives, I had to delete the object files every time I'd run the assembler and linker to free space on the disk containing my source code. Turns out that if you try to type

del *.obj

but accidentally catch the spacebar and instead type

del *. obj

then MSDOS 3.2 ignores the "obj" and deletes the entire contents of the disk

It took me about three days to stitch a couple of large 8086 assembly language source files back together manually using Norton Utilities' hex sector editor. On the bright side, I learned lots about the FAT file system's internal structure in a very short amount of time

[stek]

You'd think with 1500 VM's they'd have some sort of SAN replication or Flashcopy....

[jamesbrown]

Can't really call 'rm -rf' 'code' though really?

dumb -ass

[stek]

dumb -ass

Alexander?

[NotAllThere]

Can't really call 'rm -rf' 'code' though really?

It kind of is when it's in a script with variables. That weren't set due to a "bug"*



* Monumental stupidity.

[LondonManc]

Windows 95 in 1993?

Hmm. Windows 95. I wonder what year that was released....

[VectraMan]

This would never have happened with Windows.

IT equivalent of the darwin awards.

I did once see the whole project the team had been working on for a year disappear from the Windows For Workgroups server at about 1am on one of those mad panic "get it done and uploaded to the US client or we're all out of a job" nights. Turned out one of the company directors had mis-clicked and moved the project tree into a sub-folder in File Manager.

[FatLazyContractor]

manually using Norton Utilities' hex sector editor. On the bright side, I learned lots about the FAT file system's internal structure in a very short amount of time

[xoggoth]

Quite a few years back I got a short contract to try and piece together a defence simulator from various partial backups after somebody managed to delete/corrupt the lot and there was no full working backup. Highest paid gig I ever had.

PS Rather worrying a bit of batch file can do that. Now I shall be like that Ren & Stimpy bit. I mustn't type it in, mustn't mustn't. aaaagh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku2wFaaPAzI