Back in 2014, my first tech job, I wrote a clean-up script to delete HDFS artifacts listed in some text file. One day I modified the list and left a blank line at the end. :)

We had nightly back-ups though.

Possible explanation: lots of terminals paste on click. A single miss click can execute who know what from your clipboard.

In my experience some people keep making the same careless mistakes, the first time, you let it pass, treat it as a learning experience. The second time, you start seeing that it's always the same person doing the same mistake.

Copy pasting is not an excuse, before you run anything destructive, you double check what you're running.

Anyone who is responsible will double check before running this kind of command, and if I can't get that person off the team, I'd severely restrict his access (in general, I think most people in a team should not have access to production data).

And we do have disaster recovery plans so there's very little that could be done that would be catastrophic. But still, a lot of the disaster recovery plans call for downtime because it's not worth the cost benefit to engineer the system to be completely resilient to idiocy.

+10

Modern terminals marks pasted data as pasted, and similarly modern shells detect these marks and do not run the pasted data immediately, but shows it, highlighted, so that you can review it before confirming it.

That's why you have a backup. I also noticed that i'm incompetent on friday evenings so i avoid doing sysadmin work then.

yeah this is not something to be proud of. At least make up a reason!