Mathew Panzarino on The Next Web:
The command that had been run was most likely ‘rm -r -f *’, which—roughly speaking—commands the system to begin removing every file below the current directory. This is commonly used to clear out a subset of unwanted files. Unfortunately, someone on the system had run the command at the root level of the Toy Story 2 project and the system was recursively tracking down through the file structure and deleting its way out like a worm eating its way out from the core of an apple.
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Jacob can’t recall who on the executive staff was on staff the day that the backups were being restored, but he says that whoever was there, Steve Jobs, founder Ed Catmull and the rest of the executive staff were very supportive of the restoral efforts, rather than focusing on slashing and burning staff over the error. They bought the team Pizza that weekend, got them anything they wanted and were generally supportive.
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In the Christmas of ’98, after the release of A Bug’s Life and the promotional tour was done, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter and legendary story man Joe Ranft all came to the production team to take a look at Toy Story 2.
It was not a good film.
Quite a story. It’s truly amazing that we got a Toy Story 2, and more amazing is that, if anything, it was a better film than Toy Story. It does seem like all great stuff has some sort of horror story somewhere to tell, and this is a big one. And of course then to have to re-do the film after having lost it, recovered it, and worked on it some more. Just amazing.
And I’ve gotta tell you, the “rm” command strikes fear into my heart every time I use it (and I only ever use it over SSH to my server). Things can get really bad really fast if you “rm” the wrong thing.