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

[Hobosapien]

All these tails of woe. Someday someone will invent 'undelete'.

[Mordac]

I'd be tempted to offer to help, there's almost nothing that can't be recovered from a working hard disk, even after it has been deleted. Just a question of how much to charge...

[stek]

I'd be tempted to offer to help, there's almost nothing that can't be recovered from a working hard disk, even after it has been deleted. Just a question of how much to charge...

Most likely though as it was a VM the 'hard disk' would be dotted about on the underlying RAID6 on the SAN....

[Mordac]

Most likely though as it was a VM the 'hard disk' would be dotted about on the underlying RAID6 on the SAN....

Then he's a bigger bell-end than I was about to give him credit for...

[Contreras]

Some have seen this as evidence that he's just trolling; but we've all done something like that (though hopefully less catastrophically), so maybe not

Yep. now marked as a hoax.

Reminds me of the first week of my first 'real' job as apprentice. Inquisitive me, knowing a bit about computers, was left to have a play with the office PC. Later that day their IT help desk fell about laughing as I explained how it had stopped working after running something called "FDISK".

Couple of tricks that would have saved the day though:

~$ cat doh
#! /bin/bash
set -u
rm "${foo}/${bar}"

~$ ./doh
./doh: line 3: foo: unbound variable

~$ cat duh
#! /bin/bash
rm "${foo:?}/${bar:?}"

~$ ./duh
./duh: line 2: foo: parameter null or not set

[mudskipper]

Yep. now marked as a hoax.

WHS That man who ‘deleted his entire company’ with a line of code? It was a hoax | PCWorld

Hilarious.

[NickFitz]

WHS That man who ‘deleted his entire company’ with a line of code? It was a hoax | PCWorld

Hilarious.

And, as usual, a bunch of people who had nothing to do with it are left to clean up the mess: What to do with the "rm -rf" hoax question - Meta Server Fault