How a single Unix command nearly erased 90% of Pixar's Toy Story 2 in 1998
In 1998, Pixar nearly lost 90% of Toy Story 2's digital files when a routine Unix command (/bin/rm -r -f) was accidentally executed in the wrong directory, recursively deleting thousands of production files. The article recounts how the studio's animation pipeline ran across a network of Unix and Linux machines, and how a simple human error with a common command nearly caused a catastrophic loss of the film's data.
Key quotes
The command /bin/rm -r -f instructs the system to recursively delete everything under a directory without asking for confirmation.
At Pixar in 1998, it was apparently executed in the wrong location.
The studio's animation pipeline at the time ran across a network of Unix and Linux machines holding hundreds of thousands of production files.
From the article
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