Man accidentally 'deletes his entire company' with one line of bad code

Mridul

@Vald said:
if you are doing something illegal and you get raided, its very fast to type it before they kick the door down.

The contents of the files haven't been destroyed; all that has been lost is the directory entries for them. Provided he immediately safeguards the drives and doesn't give anything write access to them, it should be possible to recover all the data on them with the right software, although someone will have to manually sort through all the recovered data, and work out what it is and where it goes.

Vald

Licensecart said: You need to LISTEN little boy.

if you run rm / you get a popup asking for a Y N D.

if you run rm -rf / you don't get a pop up because you are using "flags"

-r => Includes folders / files -f => FORCE (this is what is known as force overwrite) meaning it won't ask you for a "are you sure?" Yes/No/Disable

For safety reasons when I use that command I do: rm -rf ./ that means ONLY this folder.

No you listen to me LITTLE SQUIRRELY LINUX CARTOON BOY

If you go back and read everything 10 times again, depending on your IQ i feel you will need 10 x 10 times, you will understand what i was really saying.

and dont come at me with that little boy crap again

Ole_Juul

The original situation obviously never happened and never will. But then someone gets into an argument about it? Hahahahahaha!

Hxxx

For things like this you need a little OCD. If you are not careful just dont play with big daddy commands. Have backups and be focus on what you are doing.

Vald

lets put the this to rest

the point was misunderstood by many, at least i am happy to discover that it's not the case with every linux system

rm: cannot remove root directory '/'

-- edit --

http://superuser.com/questions/742334/is-there-a-scenario-where-rm-rf-no-preserve-root-is-needed

DO NOT USE THIS TO DELETE ALL DATA IF YOUR SYSTEM IS UEFI (new computers) .Doing this deletes all the the firmware variables and causes the motherboard to be as useless as a brick

would this hurt the motherboard if its run from a virtual server?

dragon2611

would this hurt the motherboard if run it from a virtual server?

Unlikely I don't see why the EFI would be passed through to a VM unless someone has made a very specific effort to actually do that.

madtbh

Edit: Update: It's a joke

lewekleonek

@ricardo said:
Ansible... f*ck up at scale

Anything rm -r related, if at all possible non-root... and certainly avoid variables if possible. I tend to stare at the screen for 10 seconds, check my sanity, palpitate for a little and then enter the command.

Same here. I thought I was the only one. I have offline back-up copies; I still do that.

lewekleonek

And you guys probably already know that the whole story was a hoax and a poor attempt at marketing: http://meta.serverfault.com/questions/8696/what-to-do-with-the-rm-rf-hoax-question

jar

@lewekleonek said:
And you guys probably already know that the whole story was a hoax and a poor attempt at marketing: http://meta.serverfault.com/questions/8696/what-to-do-with-the-rm-rf-hoax-question

Seems more like he felt like an idiot and tried to play it off, but I only read English so it's hard for me to say. I'll say this: if it was marketing it was terribly done, it didn't even point me to a product or service.

globalRegisters

The story might be a hoax, but what happened is not out of the realm of possibilities.

Spacedust

But 2be.pl story wasn't and they are still down

Kris

One of my aliases:

alias rm='rm --interactive -I --preserve-root --one-file-system --verbose'

Stops you from accidentally removing root FS, or multiple disks from one command.

Shitty marketing campaign though.

Neoon