>http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/man-accidentally-deletes-his-entire-company-with-one-line-of-bad-code-a6984256.html > >I do remember hearing a similar tale of an errant "rm -r -f" being executed (while at the root directory and logged in as "root"). There are some differences, since the tale I'd heard was from about 30 years ago, so there's likely a *lot less* data involved. He also quickly realized what he'd done (just after hitting Enter -- ideally he should've noticed *before* he'd hit Enter), and knew enough of the workings of Unix to limit the amount of damage (e.g. stop all the "sync" processes that flush the cache to disc), and to perform some in-place repairs (some system files had been deleted) so that the system kept running long enough so that he could do a proper recovery later.
