this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2026
431 points (99.5% liked)

Programmer Humor

32452 readers
1709 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SavvyBeardedFish@reddthat.com 137 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 127 points 1 day ago (3 children)

rm -rf "$STEAMROOT/"* could be evaluated as rm -rf "/"* if $STEAMROOT is empty

Ah, good times.

[–] Fmstrat@lemmy.world 14 points 17 hours ago

I love how someone committed # scary! above it rather than fixing it.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Probably a good idea to enable the nounset shell option when shipping commercial-grade install scripts. 😅

[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Or just include the trailing slash in $STEAMROOT, so that if the variable is empty, it will evaluate to rm -rf "" and do nothing.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 4 points 16 hours ago

That seems like a more error-prone solution than the shell option. That would make it evaluate to rm -rf * which would probably delete your home directory, I'm guessing. And also put the burden of knowing the slash needs to be included on something completely disconnected from the expression. Nah, don't do it like that.

[–] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 5 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

That really ought to have been the default behavior. Opting out only takes one or two extra characters. Well, three or four if you don't habitually bracket your variable names, which you should probably be doing anyways

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 1 day ago

Wow.

That's a nuclear grade 'oopsie' right there hahaha!

[–] Cyber@feddit.uk 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Jeez. Didn't hear about that one, back in the day.... wow.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 9 points 17 hours ago

Linux Gaming has had some interesting moments