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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: 1) by Francis on Saturday April 16 2016, @12:45AM

    by Francis (5544) on Saturday April 16 2016, @12:45AM (#332523)

    I don't see any reference to that sort of protection on my FreeBSD install, I'm using ZFS, so I could relatively easily unmount and disconnect the non-ZFS volumes and take one last snapshot before executing the command, but I'm too lazy to purposefully nuke my system knowing that rm -rf works the way that it's designed to work.

    One of the reasons why I'm on FreeBSD is because it trusts me to know what the fuck I'm doing. The Linux "fix" at best keeps you from deleting the whole system, it doesn't protect you against executing that command from inside of /home where most or all of the files that you're likely to care about are located.