Ask HN: What was your worst typo? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What was your worst typo?

2 pointsjuujian8 comments

And what were the ramifications? Me personally, I did at some point execute `rm /bin/` instead of `rm ./bin/` when I was tired, in a rush, and dealing with annoying, terribly designed software, thankfully it was not an important system. I had terrible typos in emails, too, but I got away with it...

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Not quite a "typo" exactly, but more a misclick: a few weeks ago, I accidentally clicked the wrong "delete" button and removed a production ecommerce system for organic grocery delivery. Two days before Thanksgiving :(

When I was at school I wrote an essay on Beethoven's life. Beethoven's third symphony, the "Eroica" is important in that it is a marker of the start of the Romantic era (his first two symphonies are straight out 'Classical').

The maybe six times I mentioned it, the third symphony, I managed to each time accidentally title the work the "Erotica". Such is being a high-school student.

No important ramifications.

I went through countless change control meetings, my part being a change to the DNS primary file. Being a smart-ass, I used a curses based editor (nedit) instead of vi for this special occasion. I missed a semicolon.

DNS was down for the company for a while. Being a trading company, I don't know if I cost them or saved them money in bad trades, but traders are bookies. They make money on every bet. A buddy just fixed it for me once it was found out.

NOTE: This is what we should have done and spared those countless change control meetings.

Problem is that some genius before me (no kidding!) set up zone transfers by copying (rcp/scp) the primary file to the secondaries, defeating their ability to take over for the primary. They broke as well. I left before that issue was addressed (or not addressed)

In another job, I did run the find command with rm, and of course, the path ended up being /. Yes, it did try to delete /vmunix, but it was running. In any event, there was a Makefile or a copy lying about. No need to BART home for the backup tape. This was on the department file server and mail server. No downtime.

One time I added an extra zero . . .

Really hope you didn't work at a bank...

told my boss "no" instead of "np"

lol, that's gold!

I had, at the time, a difficult boss need COPELAND. MS Word always wanted to change his name to COPULATE. I always caught it. Also, I had an idiot co worker named TONY. Narcissist. I accidentally typed TINY, and it just kinda stuck after that.

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