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posted by cmn32480 on Friday April 15 2016, @09:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the glad-it-wasn't-me dept.

A man appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code.

By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, hosting provider Marco Marsala has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers.

Mr Marsala wrote on a forum for server experts called Server Fault that he was now stuck after having accidentally run destructive code on his own computers. But far from advising them how to fix it, most experts informed him that he had just accidentally deleted the data of his company and its clients, and in so doing had probably destroyed his entire company with just one line of code.

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.

His backups were also mounted at the time. That's a nightmare scenario, right there.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday April 15 2016, @10:04PM

    by mhajicek (51) on Friday April 15 2016, @10:04PM (#332454)

    All of his backups were mounted? Even the offsite backups that any responsible hosting service would have?

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=3, Total=3
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @11:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @11:30PM (#332500)

    They were a company that researches quantum entanglement and were developing a "Quantum Entanglement Datastore (QED)". I guess it worked ...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 16 2016, @06:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 16 2016, @06:21PM (#332848)

    consider yourself modded +6 insightful (it doesn't go higher than 5)