Did a man accidentally delete his company with one line of code?

The story of a man who accidentally deleted his entire company due to a mistake in one line of code has been published by many media outlets, but it looks like it’s not actually true.

Marco Marsala turned to IT help forum Server Fault to seek help after apparently wiping all of his company data from his servers after accidentally running a destructive command.

The command is known as rm –rf. RM means remove. R means everything within a specific directory, and F means force, meaning to ignore any safety precautions or warnings. It is a notorious piece of code that has caught out many a web programmer in the past, and certainly has the potential to cause some damage.

Marsala runs a webhosting company, meaning the data he lost would have belonged to those who hosted their websites and services with him. Big ouch.

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Many commentators on his post over at Server Fault suggested that Marsala was, well, pretty much out of options. You don’t need technical advice, you need a lawyer, wrote one.

But all is not as it seems. Many forum posters initially picked up on some discrepancies in Marsala’s story. For one, the platform he was using for his company, Ansible, would apparently not allow such a destructive command to execute.

And Marsala later admitted to Repubblica.it that it was all a hoax, a marketing campaign to help promote another one of his businesses.

Translated…

But why did I do? It is a guerrilla marketing operation, a ‘faux pas’ invented out of whole cloth just ” to advertise my startup where we offer outsourced server management services

We’re not sure how joking about losing all of your customer data is going to help positively promote a business, but it seems that in this case it was all just a silly joke.