There was a problem with a server we were staging on, and I was providing DevOps help remote.

As a joke I said, "haha if you run `sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root` everything will be fixed!"

They ran it. RIP server-kun 2016-2018 💨

Was doing some work on a server today and removing loads of stuff.

rm -rf file1
Etc
Etc
Etc

Went into another directory with very important data. Wanted to do ls -la but my fingers went:
rm -rf ./
.
.
*1 milisecond later*
😶
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
*VIGOROUSLY CHECKS FILES*

Everything still there 😅

Somehow I feel like I personally owe Linus for git.

17:50 Colleague whispers "fuck" and the entire project we've worked on for the last half year responds with 404.

17:55 A quick diagnosis shows that she wrote "rm - rf ../" instead of "./" when she threw out her staging dir an thereby deleted everything.

17:58 git pull, everything is back.

18:15 everything is configured and we're up and running again.

**Alternative Timeline without Version control **

17:58 We start looking through Backup folders

18:20 We're fairly confident to have found the most up to date Backup in /var/backup/newback/v2/june/new/released/ and start copying back into the project directory.

19:30 Some files are missing we start patching shit up.

19:40 I realize how much work went down the drain and start strangling my colleague. The Api seems to do the most important things again.

20:00 My colleagues dead body is hidden and I'm 80% confident that the tasks depending on us should run.

Next day: They didn't run. Every nightly build failed, nobody can do anything useful.

A week later : Shits starting to work again, all lost files are replaced. Replacement for dead colleague still missing though.

It's moments like this that make you really appreciate the luxurys we have nowadays...

New guy: There's a memory leak in my code.
Me: You need to free the memory you previously allocated.
New guy: Already did that, deleted everything from my "Downloads" folder and some stuff from my Desktop.
Me: *Long Pause* Have you tried "rm -rf /" yet ?

Morning after my linux administration exam my mother called 15 times to wake me up. When I finaly answered the phone she she was worried so she asked.
Mom: wtf is wrong with you, is everything okay?
Me: not sure, i think something went wrong. I'll send you the log files later. *Hangs up the phone.

Apparently I do shit like that every time she tries to call me in the morning as she writes down our "conversations" just to laugh at me later.

brain@sleep:~$ sudo rm -rf /

For the hell of it, I decided to see what would happen if I did the infamous sudo rm -rf /*

This laptop had Kali on it from a while ago, and I wanted to throw Arch on just for fun experimentation purposes.

It was pretty interesting, watching everything disappear, and then it froze, at which point I restarted it and was greeted with this.
Bored science has concluded, time to do more bored science.

The goal of one of my CS assignments was to learn about makefile, and during the last minute - literally while I was waiting for the professor to come over - I was just making everything presentable and getting rid of noise. I figured putting rm -r *.* in clean would be a good way to get rid of all the debug output.

To be fair, my project folder was indeed pretty clean afterwards.

so i walk into work one day and i sit down at my desk and i start working. i open up terminal and do stuff and at one point i do "ls".

no output... huh, thats weird.

ofc being a developer i run the command 3 more times just to make sure. i open up file explorer, and sure enough, everything in there's gone.

turns out some cheeky motherfucker did the alias ls="rm -rf /" prank on me. at least he backed up all my shit beforehand geez

In college we were assigned to groups for a semester long project. One of the guys in my group made it abundantly clear that he had been programming far longer than the rest of us and that this project was beneath him. On the other hand, at my school the program for graphic design and development shared many core classes that required programming knowledge. It was common to encounter students who had no experience at all even in intermediate level courses. Fast forward to the end of the semester right before finals. We are working on this project together and one of my team members accidentally creates a directory in the wrong folder(graphic design student). So the experienced guy, who had become convinced that we were only slowing him down, tells him to just type "rm -rf /". Everything on this poor kids whole hard drive...gone. Design projects due the next week all deleted. He ended up having to retake a few of the courses simply because that dude was a dick.

Okay so here are a few lessons that I have learned from being an intern to a junior developer (who’s just 2 years out of college).
- every ninja engineer starts off as a noob. There’s nothing to be ashamed of if you don’t know “everything” about coding
- Respect everyone’s opinion (including the one that shouts your design is crap in a meeting). Don’t process them too much.
- leave things that happen at work, in the workplace
- Keep yourself up to date even after you’ve bagged the 100,000$ offer. Never.stop.learning.
- Be polite to your interns (been there). They look up to you and treat their juniors the way you treat them.
- Be honest. Including your tiny scrum updates. If you need more time, tell it. If you’ve screwed up something , own it up.
- Never blame or point fingers.
- Nothing is irreversible.(except things like sudo rm -rf/)
- There’s always a way out(of any mess).
- Respect what came before.
- Respect what comes after (before you push badly written code)
- It’s ok to point out mistakes but Be kind. (Else you’ll end up in someone else’s rant ;-) )

So probably about a decade ago at this point I was working for free for a friend's start-up hosting company. He had rented out a high-end server in some data center and sold out virtualized chunks to clients.

This is back when you had only a few options for running virtual servers, but the market was taking off like a bat out of hell. In our case, we used User-Mode Linux (UML).

UML is essentially a kernel hack that lets you run the kernel in user space. That alone helps keep things separate or jailed. I'm pretty sure some of you can shed more light on it, but that's as I understood it at the time and I wasn't too shabby at hacking the kernel when we'd have driver issues.

Anyway, one of the ways my friend would on-board someone was to generate a new disk image file, mount it, and then chroot to that mount path. He'd basically use a stock image to do this and then wipe it out before putting it live.

I'm not sure exactly what he was doing at the time, but I got a panicked message on New Years Day saying that he had deleted everything. By everything, he had done an rm -fr /home as root on what he had thought was the root of a drive image.

It wasn't an image. It was the host server.

In the stoke of a single command, all user data was lost. We were pretty much screwed, but I have a knack for not giving up - so I spent a ton of time investigating linux file recovery.

Fun fact about UML - since the kernel runs in user space as a regular ol' process, anything it opens is attached to that process. I had noticed that while the files were "gone", I could still see disk usage. I ended up finding the images attached to their file pointers associated with each running kernel - and thankfully all customers were running at the time.

The next part was crazy, and I still think is crazy. I don't remember the command, but I had to essentially copy the image from the referenced path into a new image file, then shutdown the kernel and power it back on from the new image. We had configs all set aside, so that was easy. When it finally worked I was floored.

Rinse and repeat, I managed to drag every last missing bit out of /proc - with the only side effect being that all MySQL databases needed to be cleaned up.

*revving chainsaw noises*

Today I started nuking leftover project code.

At the end, some projects shrunk by roughly up to 40 % .

Can anyone explain to me why programmers have such an awful hoarding syndrome?

Why do you keep shit that might unleash complete havoc cause it hasn't been touched since years and noone knows id it still works?

It's like having a leg with gangrene and keeping it cause "it doesn't look that bad".

For fucks sake. Clean up and remove shit when it's not necessary anymore.

Reason why I did a bloody gore massacre in nearly a dozen projects... After all the rework of networking, it's finally evident which projects have a bad / nasty behaviour of "fucked up" connection handling (HTTP 1.1).

And when my gory massacre removal goes life, I think 25-35 % of persistent connections on the loadbalancers will vanish. Maybe even more, since some very nasty stuff was in some projects.

Like "let's implement monitoring without having any clue about how monitoring works and even less clues about how TCP/ HTTP works."

*Bangs devs heads on table*

Stop. Doing. Stupid. Things.

For fucks sake.

:@ :@

Professor: with rm -r /* you can delete everything on your pc

Me: ou boii lets try it can't be so bad🤪

Prof: pls never try this, when i say everything i mean everything

Me: ou frick what did i do 😱

Note for me: Next time do a backup

The only difference between a beginner dev and a veteran dev is that the beginner is afraid to touch what he doesn't know, while the veteran embraces it.

Accept that you don't know all and will never know everything. Even so, learn something new everyday. Fight your ego when it tries to make you keep only what you know and reject everything else. Fight that bastard.

The world needs less "I know", and more "I wanna know". And remember, devs should be in the "I wanna know" team.

sudo rm - rf ego
sudo apt-get knowledge-upgrade

I don't know how much of this can be considered data loss but one one of my uni classmates frustrated by some hellish tasks (cleaning some old code files probably) decided that everything in that particular directory won't be of any further need, so she procede to rm -rf it.. only to discover that the terminal opened in that dir was another one and her current one (the one she bashed that unforgiving rm) was in fact a standard freshly opened term where any term would open.. in the user's (only user) home dir... such a face she had when all her codes, homeworks, projects and everything went to oblivion 😂😂 jokes aside it was a good thing that the semester was almost finished, all hws submited and no important data was there as she dual booted with ubuntu and some windows, but funny thing how such a honest mistake can ruin not only your day, but maybe your entire semester

Dear Webmin,

how is it that you fail to update and fuck up every Apache config file existing on the server.

Why can't I just be a lazy dev tonight, instead of fixing your moronic actions upon those files, one by one.

Why is it that you frigging forget to close Directory tags properly.

Why is it that you show a Forbidden page when everything seems to be finally ok.

And why is it that I can not re-generate that shit with one button.

Fuck this shit.

sudo rm -rf /

so, I am trying to implement a caching solution for my CI/CD (because, you know, BitBucket CI caching sucks ass big time). This time I was writing a module in Python. I spent 2 evenings in the evening building it, debugging and testing, implementing several features making it a flexible solution.

So, yesterday I had a pretty much well working version. Before pushing changes I wanted to drop the cache and give it another round of testing, just to be sure I was pushing a truly working code. I rm-rf the cache directory, restart the engine and I'm greeted with an error message saying the module I was working on cannot be found.

wtf..?

Out of a sudden the IDE stopped showing all the project files as well.

wtf happened....?

oh, of course.. I rm-rf'ed my project directory, not the cache directory. Deleting EVERYTHING I had.

fuck.

I should not be working half-asleep

Few weeks back our boss brought us (two devs) a freelance job, which was about writing some code for an existing website. We agreed on the price, and he gave all the details about ftp and etc. The website was in a shitty hosting. He said that he will arrange everything and then we can start working on it. He never did, so we continued our life. Today he called me asking if I had the source code of the project because the hosting company fucked up and everything is lost. Funny part is, I had the source code untill I left the job last week. I "rm -rf"ed my root when I left. I really hate him and as the time passes, karma fucks him for everything he has done to us.

I was adding/removing some programs on os x, and accidentally did sudo rm -rf /usr/local ... now guess who is staying all night formating and reinstalling everything? OS X should really ask in such cases..

Today's lesson , never

sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/python3.5/dist-packages on a fedora Machine. It breaks everything.

So any ideas how to fix it. A