Back in 2002 I joined a software company where we each had personal folders on a shared 2TB volume. 2TB was a lot back then, but it was needed because we work w

Back in 2002 I joined a software company where we each had personal folders on a shared 2TB volume. 2TB was a lot back then, but it was needed because we work working with gene and protein sequences so you end up with quite a bit of data. People used these folders for builds of our systems which could be accessed from any of our various supported environments (basically every flavour of UNIX under the sun - no pun intended there). Lots of them would also use them for development work, since many people simply remoted into a convenient UNIX box and fired up emacs or vi. I was one of the few people using my local machine for development because I was working on a Java application, and running an IDE locally was simply very convenient. We also had our own CI system that built everything for every supported system overnight, and ran huge suites of automated tests, which also used this 2TB volume. The key word here is shared. I had my own folder but I could do `cd ..` and see everybody else's folders, and then go poking around in them with full read/write access. You can see where this is going, can't you? A handful of weeks before I joined the company somebody had updated a script in a test case (I forget whether it was a pre or post) that did some cleanup. The clean-up was basically an `rm -fR *` in the current directory. What they hadn't spotted before commiting the script is that they'd `cd`ed up one or two directories too far, meaning that they ran an `rm -fR *` in the root folder of the volume. Everything was gone. Nobody could get anything done, and it took them a day or two to restore the volume from backups (which, fortunately, they had). Some people lost a day or two's work so, fortunately, it wasn't a business ending event or anything like that. More a cautionary tale and an object lesson about the dangers of running commands like this with unrestricted access to volumes.