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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.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday April 15 2016, @11:24PM
It's easier in a GUI:
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday April 16 2016, @12:27AM
It's easier in a GUI:
With emacs, select-all is C-x h , so you probably won't be doing it by mistake. Also, typing doesn't replace selection by default*, so even if you accidentally C-x h and then type it won't replace anything unless you explicitly press something like delete or backspace immediately after selection. </smug emacs user>
* If you actually want that behaviour for some reason, though, you can get it by adding (delete-selection-mode 1) to your emacs config. Or temporarily by typing it into a buffer and using M-x eval-last-sexp on the line.