Re: OT - Getting fired for database oops

  • From: Stephen Booth <stephenbooth.uk@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 15:57:34 +0100

On 05/18/2009, Goulet, Richard <Richard.Goulet@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>  At the end of this long day he went to delete the saved
> config files and very absent mindly typed
> "rm -fr /".

I have a similar story about a new starter at one company I worked
for.  First day in his first real job after graduation.  Apparently he
was a UNIX genius, graduated first in his class in Computer Science.

The first task he's given is to log into the payroll server and clear
out /temp.  So he logs in and types:

$ cd/temp

$ rm -rf *

He's then very surprised to have two colleagues (me and one other)
practically leap over him to hit CTRL-C many times.  I got there first
by a fraction of a second, but then I was nearer.  What had caused
this flurry of activity was the message that appeared between those
two lines that indicated that cd/temp was not recognised as a command,
he had missed out the space in cd /temp, not been looking at the
screen (due to his confidence), not seen the error message and then
run rm -rf * in the root of the payroll server the day before the pay
run which happened to be when weekly, bi weekly, 4 weekly and monthly
paid staff were all getting paid.

He wasn't sacked, but he was a lot more careful after that.

I don't actually think the command would have run, HP UX first would
first expand the wildcard to build a list then run the command against
each member.  I suspect that the list would have been so large it
would have blown the buffer.  I think and suspect.  I'm not keen to
test it.

Stephen

-- 
It's better to ask a silly question than to make a silly assumption.

http://stephensorablog.blogspot.com/ |
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenboothuk | Skype: stephenbooth_uk

Apparently I'm a "Eierlegende Woll-Milch-Sau", I think it was meant as
a compliment.
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