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

[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

[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.

[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

[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...

[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]

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...

[Hobosapien]

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

[stek]

My colleague did that a couple of weeks ago, in the root directory logged in as root he did rm -Rf *...Everything gone, the whole system. Also attached was a NAS system and another storage system with about 120TB of data on it but we have it set up so that you can't delete anything off of it in this manner. Ha, did we take the mickey...

I wonder if the system was an EFI one because deleting /sys/firmware/efivars will brick it https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402

That's another issue, old Unixes traditionally had root's home on /, new fangled Linuxes etc stick root's home in /root, although Solaris 11 seems to do that now, AIX and HP-UX certainly don't.

I hate / being full of crap like dot directories and shell histories...

So nowadays if logged on as root not changing directory rm -rf will only delete roots files, not the root filesystem.

[mudskipper]

"The problem command was "rm -rf": a basic piece of code that will delete everything it is told to. The “rm” tells the computer to remove; the r deletes everything within a given directory; and the f stands for “force”, telling the computer to ignore the usual warnings that come when deleting files."

Years since I've done unix but even I remember that r is recursive. You don't need r to delete everything in the given directory. Shoddy reporting.

I managed to type * once in the directory where all the cron jobs were stored. Ctrl/C didn't kill it. Lots of cleanup required...

[darmstadt]

My colleague did that a couple of weeks ago, in the root directory logged in as root he did rm -Rf *...Everything gone, the whole system. Also attached was a NAS system and another storage system with about 120TB of data on it but we have it set up so that you can't delete anything off of it in this manner. Ha, did we take the mickey...

I wonder if the system was an EFI one because deleting /sys/firmware/efivars will brick it https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402

[stek]

Making it a rat?

Filligree Siberian Hamster!

[barrydidit]

I got my tar command the wrong way round once

Making it a rat?

[stek]

We are all standing here looking smug but over the years I have seen dozens of scripts that use rm -rf ${WORKDIR} as a way to clean up temp directories. I have even seen examples that allow the sodding working directories to be passed in as an argument on the command line The fact that the poor idiot didn't think it was a good idea to have his backup directories unmounted when not in use just compounds the misery.

There are only two types of people in this world those that have lost data and the rest of us....

I got my tar command the wrong way round once, trounced everyones homes into an empty file. Even now when I use tar I check it and check it again!

I never do the same wrong thing twice.....

[VectraMan]

There are only two types of people in this world those that admit to have lost data and those that are lying.

FTFY.

[jamesbrown]

Alexander?

Oui.