A Linux user's nightmare: the machine was wiped clean with one click

RedditEnjoyer@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 103 points –
Linux-käyttäjän painajainen: kone pyyhittiin tyhjäksi yhdellä klikkauksella
mikrobitti.fi
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The theme contained rm -rf, but claims it wasn't malicious intent...I assume rm -rf for cleanup, but seems like it should have a apecific path other than /

The command was rm -rf $pathvariable

Bug in the code caused the path to be root. Wasn't explicitly malicious

Don't most distros have safeguards against this? I tried sudo rm -rf / in an Ubuntu VM that I was about to delete just to see what happened, and it gave me a warning. I had to add some other option to bypass the warning.

When I worked at Pixar long ago an intern had a cron job that was intended to clean up his nightly build and ended up deleting everything on the network share for everyone!

Fortunately there were back-ups and it was fine, but that day was really hilariously annoying while they tracked down things disappearing.

Was it a native theme or a downloaded/custom theme?

Downloaded from the KDE store

Thank you. I couldn’t get google translate to work for me.