Man accidentally deletes entire company with one line of code

"If you really don't have any backups, I am sorry to say but you just nuked your entire company."

That was simple advice given to hosting provider Marco Marsala, when he asked for tech help after a simple line of computer code destroyed his entire business. Marco was in the need of some tech support after accidentally running a small bit of code in his business and was on the lookout for some encouraging words from server experts at Server Fault forums. Instead he got a "Sorry mate, but you've f*cked it". Instead he got a "Sorry mate, but you've f*cked it". The simple Skynet havoc-wreaking piece of code was "rm -rf"  - a joke within some coding communities for how destructive it is. 'Rm' tells the computer to remove, 'r' deletes everything in a certain space and 'f' skips the "ARE YOU REALLY SURE YOU WANT TO BURN EVERYTHING TO THE GROUND?" warning. Put it all together, and Marco Marsala's web-hosting company doesn't exist anymore. To add insult to injury, Marco is completely out of back-ups for his company, because the drives that were backing up the computers were mounted to it. There's up the creek - and then there's this. Here's hoping Marco can rebuild without too much fuss and loss of earnings. As for the rest of us, we'll stay eagle-eyed for any "rm -rf" commands. Good grief. This article was originally posted on JOE.co.uk.