jamespr's WebLog

The worst thing that ever happened to me in the technology realm needs to be taken with a large grain of nerdy salt and a tad of poor OS/shell design but...

I was using a SCO Unix and I was making a temp copy of the system libraries and typed:
copy /lib /lib
and forget to mention it was a different directory as I meant /lib/temp/ and with such a poorly designed shell instead of the system rejecting/ignoring the command or asking if I wanted to overwrite files with themselves, the shell just executed the command rewriting critical system libraries with 0 byte files.

Needless to say the system came to an instant halt and I had to wait 3 weeks for a recovering disk from the vendor. Thank god it wasn't a production server (or even a dev server).

Ok so this was more like the dumbest thing I ever did, rather than embarrasing thing. And I need to blame the shell and not myself as imho it's a MASSIVE hole in the system.

Way back when there was once an operating system with a handy feature to completely destroy the contents of a drive. Some whit gave this the logical executable name of ruin and didn't include any form of confirmation prompt it just did it.

Now all our scripts had to be executed in a command shell started by entering run. If you look at the keyboard I am sure you can see the possibilities for typo catastrophe. Unfortunately the client hadn't taken a backup fortunately they decided that was there fault.

Anyway James remember you were at home and being a british audience we heartilly agreed with the need to be forthright at the time.

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