this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Programmer Humor

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submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
catch {
    exec('rm -rf /*')
}
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[–] [email protected] 60 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Back in my days working as .NET developer on Windows 7, I came into work one morning to find a colleague fuming that his machine had died on him.

He spent the whole morning reinstalling Windows and getting his environment set back up, and then pulled the branch he was working on, happy to finally be done with setup and get back to work. Ran his test suite and bam, machine crashes!

It was only at that point the penny dropped. We took a look at his branch, and sure enough he'd accidentally written a test that, when ran, deleted his entire C: drive!

That particular lesson made me very careful when writing any code that does things with the filesystem.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Or, you know, run it in a chroot.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

Hey, if Valve gets to wipe home directories in released software, developers should get the chance to do it in their test code.