Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @10:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @10:57PM (#332477)

    reversed if and of and made it worse. Sounds more like a BS story to get attention.

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

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @11:11PM (#332490)

    Yeah, that certainly looks bad. Except, as mentioned above, swapping "if" and "of" would not result in any damage. The reason is that the input file is empty. This means that it wouldn't copy anything and all the data would be the same.