4 ms·
dead tired, 4am in the morning working on a client app for a huge client of theirs (I was subcontracting) was trying to remove everything inside a folder and in
by trustfundbaby 15y ago
dead tired, 4am in the morning working on a client app for a huge client of theirs (I was subcontracting) was trying to remove everything inside a folder and instead of going
rm -rf ./*
I went
rm -rf . (can't get the wildcard thingamajig to show up)
It took me a second to understand why the command was taking so long to run, by the time I figured it out and killed the command, I had wiped out almost half of what was on the drive.
Biggest "oh. my. god" moment of my life. I think I had an actual panic attack for a bit even.
Luckily, media temple had a backup from just a few hours earlier (I was lucky, they only ran them periodically and it just so happened to fall on that day).
- tta 15y agoWouldn't that just delete the folder instead of emptying it?
- delinka 15y agoBack in the day, rm followed .. if you specified it on the command line. It went like this: You are in .; The current directory listing include ..; Recursively deleting everything deletes everything on the drive. Actually, I think the one time I saw someone do this, wildcards were involved. And I was going to explain, but the comment system is making my asterisks into bold markers.
- trustfundbaby 15y agoI can't get the wildcard character to show up ... it should be x.x
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sesqu 15y agoYou can prepend two spaces to insert <code> (http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc): rm -rf ./* rm -rf *.* To stay on topic, because of this thread, I just added alias rm="rm -I" to .bashrc, and I have never yet needed -f.