Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

Don’t trust your tired self to do rm -rf right

Who, Me? Well, would you look at the calendar? It’s Monday already, and by lunchtime any fond memories of the weekend will have been erased by work worries of the sort The Register celebrates each week in “Who, Me?” – the reader-contributed column that tells your stories of making messes and somehow escaping.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Alejandro” who told us he once worked for a major multinational company and in the early 1990s was trained to perform a mainframe migration project. The plan was to bring a payroll app into the late 20th century by moving from a 1970s-vintage IBM box to a new NCR machine that ran Unix.

To make this happen, Alejandro trained for five weeks and made sure he was confident in Unix, as the old IBM box used one of Big Blue’s ancient Oses.

The project was described as a “remote unboxing” for the NCR machine, an odd term that Alejandro explained by telling us “The system was located about 1,000 miles away, in Colorado, and I had to install and configure all the system and user packages, user home directories, set up system security, initiate databases, inter-system file transfers, and so on.”

To do all that, he needed to use telnet to access the NCR Box. Readers of a certain age will recall that telnet was a tool that allowed remote access to virtual terminals.

Alejandro planned to use two virtual terminals for this job, so fired up telnet on a Friday night and got to work.

“I pulled an all-nighter and by Saturday evening I was done, and it was time to clean up,” he told Who, Me?

At the top of the cleaning list was removing the packages he’d used during the installation process, which Alejandro knew were in a certain directory. With his newfound Unix skills he typed the command he thought would wipe only the temporary files.

But with almost 24 hours of unbroken work behind him, Alejandro was a long way up the directory tree. His rm rf * command was now busy wiping the entire system he’d just built.

“I was really tired and didn't think twice about it,” he told Who, Me? And then the telnet session he was using went pear-shaped.

“It stopped responding and some strange errors were popping up,” he told Who, Me?

The obvious thing to do was check the other telnet session, which he soon saw “was busy deleting files.”

“The memory of the command I had typed returned and I felt the ground sinking below me and my chest tightening,” Alejandro wrote.

Thankfully, Alejandro knew the chap who handled backup tapes in the Colorado office. He reinstalled the OS, leaving Alejandro to once again telnet in and install the apps.

“The job was finished before start of day on Monday and my boss did not fire me,” he recalled. “And I was very happy the weekend was over.”

Have you made a mistake that meant you had to re-do a job? If so, click here to send us an email. The “Who, Me?” mailbag is in a sorry state and could really use your story! ®