SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 darkfeline on Saturday April 16 2016, @02:42AM
I think that shell scripts that would need to start with "set -ueo pipefail" should be considered for rewriting in a "real" scripting language, like Perl, Python, or Ruby, or perhaps even a language like Go, which provides static type checking, goroutines, and channels (which are superb for running different commands piped to different other commands asynchronously).
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!