this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Programmer Humor

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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
 
catch {
    exec('rm -rf /*')
}
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[–] tiramichu@lemm.ee 60 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 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.

[–] racketlauncher831@lemmy.ml 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Or, you know, run it in a chroot.

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

[–] lowleveldata@programming.dev 44 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm a big fan of just leaving the catch block blank as a nice fuck you gesture

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 22 points 10 months ago

On Error Resume Next

[–] AstroLightz@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You got the French language initials backwards, OP.

It should be rm -fr /*

[–] lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 10 months ago

Also, to make sure there are no linguistic roots left over on your system that it might grow from again, add --no-preserve-root.

[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 5 points 10 months ago
[–] x00z@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

Having your filesystem on the line might actually make some people write decent code.

[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 9 points 10 months ago

Certainly nicer than my SDL experience of catch { window.becomeunclosable(); }

[–] sepi@piefed.social 7 points 10 months ago

Halt and catch fire

[–] ConstantPain@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

The Apple way...