In case you're having a bad day at work, think of Marco Marsala.
The hosting provider accidentally typed a faulty code that permanently wiped out his entire business, including all of his customers' websites.
Marsala wrote on the Centos Server Fault forum that he unknowingly ran a bad code, "rm -rf /," on his computer and was asking for advice on how to recover from the situation. The page was flooded with comments from experts, telling Marsala that there is no escaping the mess he has created.
"If you really don't have any backups I am sorry to say but you just nuked your entire company," one of the site users, André Borie, wrote.
The terse command "rm -rf" is a basic piece of code that will completely erase everything it is told to. The code "rm" is shorthand for remove, coupled with the option tags "rf," which causes the command to be both recursive and forceful.
In this particular case, recursion means that the command will run until everything is removed from the target, while the forceful option silences the warnings and confirmation steps that would typically appear during the operation of the remove command.
Marsala was apparently doing some spring cleaning and was deleting old backups when he accidentally hit the wrong script. By not specifying a target, Marsala inadvertently hit the "root" directory. Like a tree, the root directory is the heart of the entire file structure and contains every file on the system. Without any offsite backup, there is no way to recover all the lost files.
This is not the first time "rm" has claimed a system. It has been a running anecdote among IT system administrators and computer science majors for decades. A similar event occurred during the production of Toy Story 2, where someone from Pixar ran a similar command that nearly destroyed the movie. It was only through an offsite backup that the movie was restored.
