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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: 2) by richtopia on Saturday April 16 2016, @12:00AM

    by richtopia (3160) on Saturday April 16 2016, @12:00AM (#332517) Homepage Journal

    I did something similar on my personal server. The issue was I has a symbolic link in the folder I was removing. I realized after 30 seconds that it was taking too long, but still lost 300GB of data before mashing ctrl-c.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 16 2016, @05:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 16 2016, @05:32AM (#332616)

    That's how users teach noob admins not to nuke home dirs that way.