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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 Joe Desertrat on Saturday April 16 2016, @01:12AM
Guessing it was harder to delete punch card backups though? Anyone have experience with that one?
Watched one time as someone loaded a huge stack of punch cards into the feeder. About halfway through it started shooting cards into the air instead of through the feeder. Being a new student at the time, I made the mistake of asking him why he didn't just sort them out rather then dumping the whole thing in the garbage. Learned something that day.