Marsala's story is a hoax: A few days ago we published the tragic but funny story of Marco Marsala, who allegedly deleted his entire company with a single wrong line of code last week.
The ultimate case of bad luck for the IT guy – or carelessness, as some commentators have suggested.
But not everything is as it seems. In other words: another internet hoax.
Speaking to the Italian edition of Repubblica, Marsala explained that the story was a viral way of advertising his company.
Marsala even mentions that the story actually happened, someone deleted his company with a wrong line of code “in 2006.”
In the story first reported by The Independent, Marsala posted a plea for help on the Server Fault forum as he deleted his company with the “rm -rf” command using Ansible.
As the authoritative Independent explained: “rm” tells the computer to delete, the r deletes everything within a particular directory, and the f stands for “force,” which tells the computer to ignore the usual warnings that come when deleting files.
Commenters on Server Fault then reported the bad news: there was no way to recover the files.
However, after the hoax was exposed, Marsala said that commentators forgot the fact that Ansible actually prevents such large-scale errors, and that something like that “cannot happen” with this tool.
“Almost every serious manager uses it,” Marsala said.
Moral of the story? As always, don't believe everything you read online.
