It happens with automation running as root too even with sudo. Some automation will always have to run as root. Bad characters, unset variables, lack of tests

It happens with automation running as root too even with sudo. Some automation will always have to run as root. Bad characters, unset variables, lack of tests in the script, lack of testing of the automation, lack of chaos testing. The most common clobbering of data I have seen was not so much even copy/pasting, but rather a lack of set -u set -e set -o pipefail set -o posix in scripts used by automation. There is shorthand for this that I am intentionally leaving out. Every shell script used in automation should at least have set -u to avoid running if variables are unset. An entertaining example was: rm -Rf ${MYSQL_HOME}/bin There are a couple problems with that line, but in this case they did not source their environment file correctly and wiped /bin on many servers.