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Comment by thomasahle | Hacker News Reader

An early version of PyChess had an uninstall script thst would remove the user's entire homedirectory.

The iTunes 2 installer would delete hard drives in some cases, if the installation destination contained a space character and the portion before the space matched another drive (e.g. "Seagate" and "Seagate 2"). https://www.wired.com/2001/11/glitch-in-itunes-deletes-drive...

Bungie did that with Myth 2: https://youtu.be/-p3a8eGORKY?t=513

Valve did it recently with Steam on linux!

There was once was an operating systems that allowed you to format your entire hard drive when you only intended to format a floppy disk, if you typed format c: instead of format a:. This was called Microsoft Dos 2.x.

So it did exactly what you requested it to do, no surprises at all. Got it.

Yeah but there should be a SERIOUS warning preventing that

  mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1

That's not that much different from a plausible error on Linux, with a USB drive and a hard drive.

(At least, the man page for my mkfs.vfat doesn't include any options suggesting it protects against formatting already-formatted or mounted filesystems.)

Yikes, it sure doesn't. For comparison, mkfs.ext2 asks before proceeding if there's already a filesystem, and outright exits if it's mounted.

Fair enough -- I was assuming based on the lack of documented "force" options that other mkfs' (mkfs.ext4 etc) have.

dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/wrong_disk

Killed a windows install (which had the first partition on the disk) only a year ago with that one.

I lost about 5 hours work by getting the order of input/output parameters wrong in a tar command. No warnings, nothing.

"Yes by all means, use a nonexistent file as input to overwrite an existing file That doesn't even have a .tar extension. That's exactly what I wanted"

Myth was one of my favorite games as a teenager. The dark fantasy atmosphere really captured my imagination, and I still have a little giggle when I think about exploding dwarves. :D

It was their laugh when things blew up, and their sarcasm that I enjoyed. "Yeah Yeah, over there" "Now what?"

Pool of Radiance would wipe your hard drive on uninstall.

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