"This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Wilma" who told us that while at university she volunteered with a group working on the student association's website. The team completed a new version of the site, and Wilma got the job of uploading it She therefore set out to delete the old site, before loading the new code. "To my horror I realized I was in the root directory of the web server - /var/www -ratherthan the directory holding the files for the site," she told Who, Me? "I had just deleted all websites on the student association's webserver.""
"In her defense, Wilma told The Register that at the time "I was quite new to Linux and wasn't used to command line interfaces." "The server was quickly restored from backups by someone competent and I was not allowed to work on the website anymore," she told Who, Me? "After that I developed the habit of double checking what I'm about to do on the Linux command line before pressing Enter," Wilma wrote. "Because as I learned, Linux will do what you said to do and it WON'T ask if you are sure.""
While volunteering to update a student association website, Wilma deleted the wrong directory on the web server and removed all hosted sites by deleting /var/www. The accidental deletion occurred because she worked from the command line and was new to Linux. A competent administrator restored the server from backups and she was no longer allowed to manage the website. She adopted a practice of double-checking command-line actions before pressing Enter. The incident demonstrates that Linux executes commands without confirmation and that reliable backups and careful verification prevent catastrophic data loss.
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