oh snap... you rekt...

[Heffernan]

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... 84256.html

http://serverfault.com/questions/769357 ... om-a-rm-rf

I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.

All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).

How I can recover from a rm -rf / now in a timely manner?

[Thor]

Best to not code drunk.

[Forungi]

Best troll of 2016 confirmed

[Kandarim]

and that, children, is why you always dry-run a script involving rm.

Also, I am pretty sure it's just a troll post. rm uses --preserve-root by default (don't remove "/"), which no sane person would ever turn off.

[Qiresea]

that can't be true. what kind of an idiot would run an rm -rf, seriously...

[Kandarim]

rm -rf is used quite often, and occasionally even in scripts like the above one.
However, you should never ever turn off --preserve-root. There have been cases of hardbricking laptops (because, as I recall, the UEFI motherboard settings can be removed through linux mountpoints)...

FFR, the safe usage is not to include any slashes whatsoever in your rm command, i.e. doing

cd /dir/path/
rm -rf dir

Still, I think the above issues deserved it for their careless use of rm. Seriously, who 'accidentally's --no-preserve-root?

[saltmummy]

Good luck getting a new job in the programming sector after this.

[Inotdead]

Wow.

I'll just pretend that it was intentional sabotage and the man got bribed to do that.

[Dallane]

Good luck getting a new job in the programming sector after this.

This wont affect anything with getting jobs.

[Heffernan]

Good luck getting a new job in the programming sector after this.

This wont affect anything with getting jobs.

yeah right? how would destroying a whole company not get him a new job.... right guys...?