| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
BIG mistake
This sobering headline was on Drudge this morning:
Ouch. Big. Major. OUCH.
According to the article:
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 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.
Together, the code deleted everything on the computer, including Mr Masarla’s customers websites, he wrote. That piece of code is so famously destructive that it has become a joke within some computing circles.
Normally, that code would wipe out all of the specific parts of the computer that it was pointed at. But because of an error in the way it was written, the code didn’t actually specify anywhere – and so removed everything on the computer.
I can’t even imagine. It’s bad enough to lose data on a computer — but to erase a whole company?
Speaking of which, time to back up both the blog and my laptop….
Source: http://www.rural-revolution.com/2016/04/big-mistake.html
