I was once trying to clear some space on a unix server
and found buried about 10 levels deep a copy of the entire home directory.

So I typed rm -rf home/*

Well, I meant to. I actually typed rm -rf /home/*

Which deleted the entire home directory and brought the production server down. Oops.
( The Light in Chains don't touch the Pope's boner, Tue 17 May 2016, 17:56, 13 replies)

Classic!

(dozers, do fuck off ur a nob m8, Tue 17 May 2016, 18:30, closed)

Similar
Working on a PDP-12 or similar I used Purge to delete all files of a particular name, thinking it left the most recent version. It didn't, and of course no one had thought to make backups of the file in question. So I had to reprogram the entire thing. On the upside, I learnt how to program in Pascal. On the downside, I've never had to program in Pascal since.
(Smale is stuffed, Tue 17 May 2016, 19:13, closed)

yup done that too, once bitten twice shy with rm
( rwbthatisme is on holiday this week, Tue 17 May 2016, 20:16, closed)

You complete and utter gonk.

( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Tue 17 May 2016, 20:18, closed)

Star Wars?

( Pig Bodine., Tue 17 May 2016, 20:44, closed)

you fucking stupid cunt

(Baggenfrock get fucked, Tue 17 May 2016, 23:34, closed)

was it www.b3tards.com?

( ferret -> twitter.com/syfyautocorrect <-, Wed 18 May 2016, 5:31, closed)

Should you be allowed near important machinery?

( drimble he'd been white, he'd been black, Wed 18 May 2016, 7:24, closed)

Command line?
Command lol, more like!
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Wed 18 May 2016, 11:14, closed)

Did you know oracle db's really don't like it if you delete their redo logs while the db is up and running?
I do. Now.
( Slippery Mick &#8207;, Wed 18 May 2016, 16:02, closed)

In a similar vein
chown -R www-data /
instead of
chown -R www-data .

They're one key apart and it was too long before I noticed. I had to recover the server from an image backup.
( evil_andy Stick stick stick stick sticky sticky stick stick, Thu 19 May 2016, 0:19, closed)

And then all the dinosaurs got out and ate everyone.
You are Nedry AICMFP
( 2 Can Chunder Word to your mums, I came to prod bums, Thu 19 May 2016, 17:53, closed)

Installs Engineers ... tsk...
No idea what we was doing on SCO-Unix box. Trying to use Vi, manages to create a text file called '*' at root, as root. Immediately goes - as we watch in horror - rm *

Didn't delete everything - but enough. Fucked a GP whole back office system for a few days....
(TheManofScience, Wed 25 May 2016, 14:58, closed)