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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 Justin Case on Saturday April 16 2016, @02:40PM

    by Justin Case (4239) on Saturday April 16 2016, @02:40PM (#332750) Journal

    I do not know where so many people get the idea one has to spend so much money when it is so much more productive to know what you are doing.

    Because most people don't know what they're doing, but they do know how to spend money!

    Sorry to hear your story, BTY. I too was bitten hard by "double-space". It was near the end of a burst of creativity and I hadn't run my tape backups yet. I still fondly remember some of that code, never recovered, clumsily and partially re-implemented.

    I renamed dblspc.dll to dvlspc.dll where "dvl" was my abbreviation for "Devil". (Might not have been a .dll suffix, it was a while ago.)

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday April 16 2016, @10:19PM

    by anubi (2828) on Saturday April 16 2016, @10:19PM (#332971) Journal

    It sure is a lot easier to spend money than it is to make it, eh?

    That was my first experience with doublespace. Once I found out what was going on, and why my machine was running so poorly, I threw a fit. Right then and there in the conference room.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]