The newbie of this story jumped through two hoops to run the script "to find out what it does". He would surely jump through the hoop of changing it to a worki

The newbie of this story jumped through two hoops to run the script "to find out what it does". He would surely jump through the hoop of changing it to a working shell as well. Obvious only in retrospect would be to remove the "DROP TABLE" commands. Those contain no useful information worth keeping around -- the CREATE TABLE commands do. Of course, the best and most general solution is exactly what he did: Keep backups and logs sufficient to rebuild everything up to the moment it was ruined. That will save his neck again someday, for a completely unrelated reason.