How A Steam Bug Deleted Someone’s Entire PC

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A deeper look into a steam-for-linux GitHub issue (github.com/valvesoftware/stea...) investigating how a steam script was able to delete the entire contents of someone's root directory. While the direct cause of the rm -rf is fairly obvious, how it was triggered in the original bug report is not, and may forever remain a mystery...
Sources:
www.opensuse-forum.de/thread/... (buggy copy of steam.sh posted by "Acies")
wiki.archlinux.org/title/steam
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:26 Steam on Linux
1:40 The Bug
2:58 STEAMROOT
6:04 reset_steam()
8:11 Valve theory
9:21 My "theory"
10:34 Fix
Corrections:
- At 0:56 the descriptions for /bin and /usr/bin are historically correct, but on modern Linux distributions (e.g. beginning in Ubuntu 19.04), /bin is replaced with a symlink to /usr/bin (in a transition called "merged /usr" or "/usr merge") so both contain the same contents.
Music:
- We Shop Song by Philip Milman
- Blue Mood by Robert Munzinger
- Aloft by LEMMiNO ( • LEMMiNO - Aloft (BGM) )
- Firecracker by LEMMiNO ( • LEMMiNO - Firecracker ... )
- Cool Vibes by Kevin MacLeod
- Financial Obligations by Philip Milman

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12 июн 2024

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Комментарии : 1,9 тыс.

@aperture147 4 месяца назад

"# Scary" is my new fear.

@kazii_the_avali 4 месяца назад

same.

@Mitch-xo1rd 4 месяца назад

If you know it is bad enough for a code comment, why use it????

@grayman2749 4 месяца назад

@@Mitch-xo1rd Diversity hiring.

@diabolo1809 4 месяца назад

They probably didn't have the authority to change it so they just commented it and hoped someone would notice and change it themselves. @@Mitch-xo1rd

@summerchilds 4 месяца назад

@@grayman2749 the fuck

@NikoTheFox 4 месяца назад

Installing Steam on Linux just for it to delete everything sure sounds familiar

@tanmaypatel3291 4 месяца назад

😂😂😂Linus lmao

@beanietechie 4 месяца назад

i mean that was specifically a misconfiguration on pop!_os and even then it literally said on the screen that it would likely break the system and literally has you type something like "Yes, break my system." before it lets you perform the action

@buysnoah 4 месяца назад

Ok@@beanietechie

@unixlonix 4 месяца назад

@beanietechie its bad design, the error should have been red in the terminal

@sealdoggy8785 4 месяца назад

@@unixlonix if you have to type out a whole sentence to do a command that should be a good enough sign to pay attention to what you're doing

@XxRedRocket15xX 4 месяца назад

I love how the bug nuked the backup drive for good measure.

@309electronics5 4 месяца назад

Yep. Linux just deleted itself and the data on the mounted drive 😂🤦. They should have put a safety mechanism so when you execute it it wont delete the whole os but will error out unless you provide --no-preserve-root

@TheMrMaxx 4 месяца назад

When rm -rf / deletes your backup, the backup strategy was very poor

@ebux9885 3 месяца назад

@@TheMrMaxx It deleted /mnt (or /media)

@DistrosProjects 3 месяца назад

@@309electronics5-no-preserve-root only works when the command is rm -rf /, not if its rm -rf /*.

@greggoog7559 2 месяца назад

Exactly. None of my TWO physically independent and far-apart backup devices are EVER mounted EXCEPT during the feckin backup.

@williamdrum9899 4 месяца назад

This is the programming equivalent of leaving a loaded gun on the floor and wondering how your dog died

@flameofthephoenix8395 4 месяца назад

Still don't understand, I mean like I let the dog into the house, and boom, he just disappeared into this weird mushy pile. I guess I should've known better than to let him into the house for the first time, figures he'd find some way to kill himself with no past experience in a house before to guide him different.

@orppranator5230 3 месяца назад

Dog has no opposable thumbs, and doesn’t know how to turn the safety off

@davidphillips5677 2 месяца назад

@@orppranator5230 no the dog can use it's teeth

@xFlRSTx 2 месяца назад

@@flameofthephoenix8395 >are you sure you want to____ yourself (🐾/🐾)? >🐾

@gabrielandy9272 2 месяца назад

@@orppranator5230 don't doubt physics and bad lucky, you will be amazed at how many crazy bad lucky some stuff can get, some people got hit for a whell in the most weird places you can think off, im pretty sure somehow pushing the wall or something or whatever the dog could by mistake trigger all this.

@AQDuck 4 месяца назад

Whenever "root" is mentioned in a "bug" video, you know exactly what's up

@sametekiz3709 4 месяца назад

yep

@levitatingbusinessman2560 4 месяца назад

sure buddy

@narrativeless404 4 месяца назад

"root" = rm -rf

@yangpaan453 4 месяца назад

no i dont, because roots to me are the things that suck up nutrients from the ground for plants.. not everyone "knows whats up" when it comes to pc stuff

@yangpaan453 4 месяца назад

sure but you cant just erase things in real life so that analogy made no sense. and if tree roots get damaged they regrow them.@@gaelurquiz5755

@ojmbvids 4 месяца назад

Wow! I can't believe they'd script something like that with an rm -rf. It clearly rang alarm bells from the comment. How did this get through code review without someone shouting NOPE!

@GammaFn. 4 месяца назад

The desired behavior is to remove everything under $STEAMROOT without user intervention. 'rm -rf' is the correct choice. I struggle to see what solution you would choose instead. The problem here is that there was no sanity check on $STEAMROOT.

@skun406 4 месяца назад

Well, there was a "Scary!" comment so it was kinda ok-ish 🤣🤡

@ronsmith4325 4 месяца назад

To me, this says there is no code review process at all. Lol.

@not_ever 4 месяца назад

There has to be a code review for something to get through code review

@solitudesf8111 4 месяца назад

steam is dogshit

@Knowbody42 4 месяца назад

There was an Nvidia driver bug that did the same thing once. It was caused by them accidentally adding a space in the delete command.

@commander3494 4 месяца назад

Nvidia (linux) drivers and breaking things, name a better duo

@evi-vw 4 месяца назад

@@commander3494 I been using Linux for 17 years and exclusively nvidia. I never seen any problems that people constantly talked about with nvidia drivers. I am starting to think it's a myth or just some serious user error.

@ggsap 4 месяца назад

No, it was a third party tool called Bumblebee which was like nvidia optimus

@blitzkringe 4 месяца назад

Deleting /usr is nothing compared to deleting the whole user data. At worst (if you don't use btrfs snapshots or a similar solution) it's just an hour to reinstall your system, and you're done.

@Nocommentsuwu 4 месяца назад

DON'T USE NVIDIA WITH LINUX, YOU WILL HAVE PAIN IN THE ASS, BUY FUCK AMD GPU AND ENJOY YOUR DAY

@ThatComputerGuyRyan 4 месяца назад

Imagine being Valve, one of the most well-known software companies that builds and maintains Steam, writing a launcher for Linux that invokes rm -rf with no safeguards. Invoking the command at all is seriously risky. Who in their right mind would look at that line of code and just say "Scary" and allow it to be part of the script?

@mr.cauliflower3536 4 месяца назад

Someone who doesn't know/care/get paid enough to fix/check it themselves. I think I could see myself being an intern and doing that, then going to a higher up and saying "hey, this is scary, you should probably find a better way to do this" and never following up on it.

@berbtheherb 4 месяца назад

Some real Adeptus Mechanicus stuff

@outerfuel 4 месяца назад

The developer was an honest person and practiced the scripture they were taught. Saying as they committed, "Forgive me father for I have sinned." Then left us a hieroglyph. # Scary

@SuprSBG 4 месяца назад

Probably the 4 Linux programmers there /s

@eliontheinternet3298 4 месяца назад

Someone on a deadline probably

@kirkanos771 4 месяца назад

In the 90s, when Diablo had an extension called Hellfire, made by Sierra, the uninstaller of the extension was deleting everything in C:\Games\ instead of C:\Games\Sierra Online\. Too bad for those who installed in Program Files at the time.

@Doc_Fun 4 месяца назад

That is such a 90's sierra move honestly. Wasn't enough to bust my balls with their point and click games, now they gotta wipe my games folder for daring to uninstall their bad diablo addon.

@vdmir40 4 месяца назад

as someone who installed 120+ gigabytes of games in C:\Games im terrified

@subzero0000 4 месяца назад

😂

@uponeric36 4 месяца назад

This is why you never use uninstall scripts and just delete the entire folder directly.

@xFlRSTx 4 месяца назад

@@uponeric36 there are often other folders you aren't aware of that you miss doing that.

@jaixial 4 месяца назад

If you find yourself pushing a comment to production that says #scary! - Maybe you are doing it wrong.

@agsystems8220 4 месяца назад

It looks like a junior programmers way of writing "this is what I want, this should not pass review, but they can tell me how I should do it"... And it passes review... I have no problem with the code. It's the reviewers that didn't do their job.

@oracle372 4 месяца назад

@@agsystems8220 Or someone coded that in and someone else added # Scary as a note assuming it’d be altered later… (it wasn’t)

@SethAbercromby 4 месяца назад

"This is a spooky way of doing it, but it shouldn't trigger under normal conditions." - Famous last words of any software engineer. It's easy to backseat these kinds of things with the power of hindsight or as a solo developer on small projects, but in a turbulent development environment where tasks are juggled by many people, shortcuts and temporary solutions become extremely common.

@professorhaystacks6606 4 месяца назад

"TODO: FIX THIS!!! -2/5/68"

@joseaca1010 4 месяца назад

Look up "the rapidly dwindling sanity of valve programmers as expressed through code comments" This isnt even their worst code spaghetti

@axelaguilar6437 4 месяца назад

"Everything is impermanent and transient. Especially bits on a disk. No use crying over flipped bits." I want to be like keyvin

@3rdalbum 4 месяца назад

This data will be lost, like tears in the rain

@superplaylists1616 3 месяца назад

From now on I will just assume my data will eventually be leaked and my files eventually deleted. Let us all be like keyvin. 😔

@Yardomaster 4 месяца назад

I like the theory, because it explains why Keyvin was so calm and collected; he didn't have much to lose if he just built the PC.

@jeuonly3474 4 месяца назад

he still said it wiped his whole external storage tho

@Yardomaster 4 месяца назад

@@jeuonly3474 True, for some reason I thought that was a separate incident with someone else. The external drive could have been part of the new setup as well. Or maybe Keyvin just took it like a champ.

@christophsiebert1213 4 месяца назад

No matter how, having your whole setup deleted is... scary

@jackspedicy2711 4 месяца назад

Accidental bad code deletes external hard drive with your entire lifes photos, movies and films, and even photos digitized photos of your grandmother from 80 years ago... but... the person who made the code was broblably really happy about that paycheck, so y'know, whatever

@da_pwo 4 месяца назад

@@jackspedicy2711people usually backup those files, and there’s plenty of data recovery software that works because computers just mark a file space as empty so the programs just search for the files

@cheeky6930 4 месяца назад

Dude you have seriously found your niche with this type of content, covering software failures in a funny and digestible way. Love watching your videos.

@Saismee 4 месяца назад

exactly my thoughts. always a good day when he posts

@ponyride23 4 месяца назад

And this was so desperately needed by many of us!

@MrMousedroppings 4 месяца назад

Totally agree, it's so well done and interesting

@ravxen 4 месяца назад

I just discovered this video and within the intro I was hooked and decided to stick around! :D

@John-vu5qm 4 месяца назад

fireship copycat

@jm-alan 4 месяца назад

Correctly referencing relative directories is one of the greatest struggles with shell scripts. It's why so often simple install scripts are still written Python or even C, just to have access to the OS tools to reliably tell you where you are.

@KucheKlizma 4 месяца назад

Relative directories are neither correct nor reliable, they are relative. C and Python are more than capable tools and can just as easily be used to produce equivalent bugs.

@pokestarfan5336 4 месяца назад

@@KucheKlizmaThr unique part of Python is that if something doesn’t work it’ll usually throw an exception by default. Usually Python functions also have documentation noting any footguns as well, whereas I learn most Bash things off of StackOverlow with the footgun warning buried under 15 comments

@max06de 4 месяца назад

Bash has global options (like the mentioned set -o pipefail, or set -e) that also make the interpreter fall on its back if an unhandled return code (not 0) appears somewhere. It's just people not knowing them...

@pokestarfan5336 4 месяца назад

@@max06de it’s not default, and there’s the problem. Many many people won’t change the defaults. If by default Bash scripts crashed when a command failed and the error wasn’t handled, I bet we wouldn’t see this type of error at all

@lePoMo 4 месяца назад

@@max06de the problem is not if it is possible by a knowledgeable person, but what comes out if an unknowing person writes a bash script. (shell) scripting languages are meant to be convenient, with lots of shortcuts/magic syntax. This is making the risky thing easy, and the rigorous thing posible. a (more) regular programming language has more overhead, by basically not offering the easy but risky way. I've accidentally deleted files with bash because i didn't think about directories with a space in their name. Not because you can't handle those, but because i wrote a one-liner with lots of pipes and awk and xargs and didn't think it through. (worked fine until a dir had a space).

@kingcowt1299 4 месяца назад

“Scary!” Good one, Valve!

@naidr0x 4 месяца назад

It's outrageous that someone put a "Scary!" comment but never bothered to implement any safety measures. If you feel like doing the former, the latter should be out of the question.

@richardkapowsky6073 4 месяца назад

What gets me is someone wrote this code, looked at it, knew it would be a problem so they commented # Scary, did nothing to fix it, and will you look at that.... It ended up being a problem.

@gavinrolls1054 2 месяца назад

more like the code reviewers didn't fix it

@deineroehre 2 дня назад

@@gavinrolls1054 But what would have stopped the programmer from doing it right in the first place? A check if the variable is not empty is not that hard to implement...

@jee213_ 4 месяца назад

Steam really just said “Go touch Grass”

@sandwich5344 4 месяца назад

I dont think you can `touch grass` it'll throw an error

@dmitriyrasskazov8858 4 месяца назад

@@sandwich5344 just tried, $ touch grass worked for me

@_aurora60 4 месяца назад

@@sandwich5344actually `touch grass` creates an empty file called “grass”, no error whatsoever:)

@Grocel512 4 месяца назад

@@sandwich5344 It will create an empty file called "grass" in the working directory.

@Mempler 4 месяца назад

@@sandwich5344shutup and take my `cat grass`

@anybody3689 4 месяца назад

I've been joking around how rm -rf / is (pretty much) the equivalent of removing system 32 or whatever on Windows. Now knowing that this managed to be an actual thing on a legit piece of software is just as hilarious as scary

@Avgsharkenjoyer 10 дней назад

I love that there was clearly a steam engineer who saw this coming and even left a comment but nothing was changed

@nodrance 4 месяца назад

this is horrifying. Like wtf. The "only one person has gotten this issue in a few years so we can safely mark it resolved" reads like a horror movie where someone sacrifices lives for selfish reasons. What about the dozens of people who never made a comment/issue (r didn't know where to) and just took the loss, or went AFK when it happened and didn't realize it was steam that did it? This is frankly disturbing and steam should really do better.

@c1nquedea47 4 месяца назад

but what can they do about it at this point besides fixing the problem

@vulpzin 4 месяца назад

How do we even know if they aren't even lying?

@nolram 4 месяца назад

They provided no evidence nor further info… so not much one can do

@tacokoneko 4 месяца назад

i have been using GNU/Linux and steam for 12 years but this didn't happen to me and i didn't previously know about it. when 3:07 appeared on my screen i immediately felt sick. everything that happens after that is watching a train wreck in slow motion. that code isn't just "scary" , it's a live land mine that something will always set off eventually

@vilian9185 4 месяца назад

btw it was how steam did it, so they do better now

@Andrew-zg7nh 4 месяца назад

"this is very far fetched but technically possible" many situations in work atm

@temkin9298 4 месяца назад

Experts: This is fool proof Bored people locked in a closed space: Are you sure about that? Example: One military before ww2 issued a rifle which had a barrel that had the same size as the bayonet base. Days later almost all rifles were connected barrel to bayonet, resulting in engineers complaining and demanding the rifle be withdrawn. If the plans doesn't survive encounter with the enemy, then fool proof tools doesn't survive the encounter with a person in closed space.

@earthling_parth 4 месяца назад

This is just the right amount of horror mixed in with some hilarious scripting gotcha's. Please make this series a regular, I don't care where you get your issues/blog posts/articles, I need this in my life ❤

@jademonass2954 2 месяца назад

they used a "rm -rf" and didnt even make a check to see if the string afterwards was empty? broo i get that they tecnically DID do so to enter the restart steam function, but like, rm -rf is like a loaded gun, double precausions is a must

@GodDamnitTwitch 4 месяца назад

that one poor Ubuntu user a few years ago who came across this bug. God help them they got everything sorted. I'd be going mad in that situation.

@Lurch-Bot 4 месяца назад

Accidentally deleted the Ubuntu drive on my dual boot laptop from Windows (shouldn't be able to do that in the first place, thank you Microsuck). That made me mad. Luckily, it was a new installation. Steam deleting the entire contents of my hard drive would make me furious and bloodthirsty. I was all set to try gaming on Linux this year but now I am having second thoughts, especially since I am going to be using my Linux machine to take a cybersec course and will likely have projects and stuff on it. Not that I don't back up important files but I don't need to have to reinstall everything randomly some time when I need to do work.

@silicalnz 4 месяца назад

Just blackbox steam on a partition it cant escape from. Its not good for productivity for steam to be on a work system anyway. haha

@futuza 4 месяца назад

@@Lurch-Botjust make sure to not give steam any permissions outside of the directory it's supposed to be in, treat it like malware and you should be safe

@bartek1887 4 месяца назад

@@Lurch-Bot This isn't really a bug that can only happen on Linux, since this was just deleting the wrong folder, which has happened on windows before (for example the Minecraft Dungeons uninstaller used to delete the parent folder instead of where its installed, so if you had it installed in C:\Program Files\Minecraft Dungeons it would delete C:\Program Files). Nowadays this is actually less likely to happen since in order to rm -rf / you need to also add --no-preserve-root

@JackPorter 4 месяца назад

i'm almost certain "that one poor user" was trolling. no info or proof, just trying to scare steam out of using batch.

@qlum 4 месяца назад

The problem with shell scripts is not that they cannot be safe, it's also not that they will cause issues. It is however very easy to make these type of errors. Far more so than in other languages.

@DaCoolX Месяц назад

There is something called unofficial bash strict mode(internet search is your friend) which I extensively use and encourage anyone writing bash scripts to use as-well.

@qlum Месяц назад

Looked it up, sure that helps make it a bit less risky as well as always using shellcheck, but shell scripts are still relatively unsafe.

@poka26ev2 16 дней назад

I use MacOS (the older

@poka26ev2 16 дней назад

wtf, if youtube disabled links, why did it detect ".zip" as a link 💀

@zoss0 4 месяца назад

I like potential in this series. Especially how you go over seemingly simple things like the Linux filesystem for the people who are new or curious, keep that in there.

@neskey 4 месяца назад

I love these videos. people always say that code looks dull on video but I never understood that. code can have as much expression as any written work. just that you need to know how to frame it the right way. thanks for the vids Kevin!

@aesthesia5023 4 месяца назад

Devs please stop using rm -rf with variable paths

@jonasdatlas4668 4 месяца назад

yes like that’s terrifying

@zombie_pigdragon 4 месяца назад

It's that easy!

@Spiderfffun 4 месяца назад

sudo rm -rf / whoopsies, not what i meant to do

@lost4468yt 4 месяца назад

Hey bud, sometimes they just straight up hardcode it to delete a root directory.

@jeanlasalle2351 4 месяца назад

However, always ensure that you remove the unnecessary french translations with "rm -fr /*"

@Stealth86651 4 месяца назад

Man, I'm so glad you made this channel/make this content. I had an idea like this ages ago, a channel that went over software bugs/issues in business but am neither creative nor smart enough to put stuff like that together. Funny that you're channel pops up and is basically exactly what I was looking for, thanks for that.

@dexterrity 4 месяца назад

I had this idea today for a global fleet of airships that rise above clouds and ride jet streams across the world. They use wind and sun energy to produce and store hydrogen fuel, and then transport it to major hubs for further distribution. But I prob can't pull it off so I'll just leave the idea here in this comment.

@JorgetePanete 4 месяца назад

your*

@rudinah8547 4 месяца назад

Your stuff is so good! Love how you always spend some portion at a really low level, like explaining bash scripting minute details, but keep it high level too

@kangalio Месяц назад

Shell as programming language was a mistake

@mixorin 4 месяца назад

New fear unlocked

@Steamrick 4 месяца назад

This is a perfect example of why you make backups and don't save them to the same machine you're backing up...

@isbestlizard 4 месяца назад

Or a mountpoint, it could have been a network file system but mounted somewhere rm will happily destroy everything it can find XD

@TheAkashicTraveller 4 месяца назад

@@isbestlizard This makes me think rm as it is just shouldn't exist.

@erikkonstas 4 месяца назад

If you watch the video, it says that the backup *drive* was also wiped out...

@VictorRodriguez-zp2do 4 месяца назад

He backed it to another drive, the thing is the drive was mounted, likely on /media/, and since /media is inside of / it gets equally rekt

@Steamrick 4 месяца назад

@@erikkonstas A drive attached to the local machine via USB (or iSCSI mountpoint, I don't care) is still effectively local. Hence, don't backup up your data to a different drive on the same machine. If rm -rf doesn't get it, ransomware is another contender for 'where did my backup go'.

@notjoemartinez4438 4 месяца назад

Windows users will never understand having the freedom to wipe your filesystem with a typo

@williamdrum9899 4 месяца назад

The Virgin Delete System32 The Chad rm -rf / The Thad Commodore PET Killer Poke

@futuza 4 месяца назад

I mean powershell can still do this...

@dariusduesentrieb 4 месяца назад

You often can recover rm -rf data, though it is more likely to work on harddrives than on ssds. The first thing to do in such a case is to clone the entire disc using dd rescue. Then one can use proprietary tools to recover the deleted files. Though a good first start may be testdisk and photorec which are totally free.

@TimeLemur6 4 месяца назад

True, but it depends on how long the system's been running like that, and how much you care.

@kuroenekodemon 3 месяца назад

So how to you recover it when you nuke root? Isn't the kernel completely destroyed after that?

@dariusduesentrieb 3 месяца назад

@@kuroenekodemonYou can boot another OS from a USB stick, and from there you use tools like photorec to recover files from the disk you deleted files from. The files are usually still there after deleting, because deleting doesn't overwrite them, it just removes the filesystem dictionary entry. But by looking at the bit patterns (e.g. typical for png, mp4, etc), often it is still possible to find these files, even if there isn't a dictionary entry anymore.

@MrDaAsif 4 месяца назад

"but he didn't provide any details so we can mark this issue as resolved" ah yes, the "if I cannot observe a bug it is not there"

@erikkonstas 4 месяца назад

So... what brings you to this channel? Surely not your inexperience as a dev, which makes you throw excrement without explanation and expect a real answer...

@MrDaAsif 4 месяца назад

@@erikkonstas what are you talking about? Did you respond to the wrong comment? I'm so confused lol

@GDNachoo 4 месяца назад

I mean, if that seriously was something that happened they'd have to open a new issue or provide details, there's not much anyone can do otherwise lol, plus it's one guy in several years, there's a good chance they're just lying too

@NolenFelten 4 месяца назад

A moment of silence for the data destroyed by this event.

@NightmareRex6 4 месяца назад

imagine whole games and mods that wont exist now becuase of it? and maby some youtubeseries as well.

@NolenFelten 4 месяца назад

@NightmareRex6 I lost a lot of music and i still spend hours trying to find it again because of a fire. It's sad, man, like an old man that lost his wife. Accidentally lost an entire families photo collection when I was a stupid teenager trying to fix their computer. But that's their problem, not mine, I want my music back! Stuck my in my head with no track ID and I listen to mainly electronic music with no lyrics.

@nicholasvinen 4 месяца назад

@dedusmuln 4 месяца назад

sooo thankful for your channel man. all your videos are about topics i'm super interested in but theyre so easily digestible and visually fun 😊 quite the standout in videos of this caliber! keep up the good work, i hope your channel brings you good returns for all youve shared with us ☺️

@LethalChicken77 4 месяца назад

"Oopsie whoopsie just ran rm -rf *" X3

@somethingpeculiarthistime 4 месяца назад

These are so damn well made, nice work dude!

@tesla1772 4 месяца назад

Everything that could go wrong went wrong 😢

@bryangichuru9 4 месяца назад

This has been my favourite RU-vid channel for some time now. The thought of writing a bug that may end up on one of these videos keeps me writing good code everyday.

@Lachrymogenic 4 месяца назад

Man loses all of his files and stays calm and collected. He is a psychopath. "Scary!"

@blinking_dodo 4 месяца назад

And that is why before you recursively delete things in a script, you check for an expected value present at that location! (A file named "this_is_the_steam_folder.txt" for example.) I always try to implement such sanity checks, just to be sure i don't rm-rf my home folder with all my precious files. (that i don't have a backup of! 😅)

@TARS.. 4 месяца назад

Yeah I’m really paranoid about this, I’m constantly ls-ing and pwd-ing that it looks like I have short term memory

@maxxiong 4 месяца назад

@@TARS.. you realize you can see the pwd in the shell prompt right? Also I use zsh which asks me to confirm and usage of rm *

@TARS.. 4 месяца назад

@@maxxiong oh no yeah I do, but ill still double check. Like I said I'm paranoid

@DeusinMachina 4 месяца назад

So I think bash is good for simple things, but unfortunately doing anything other than running a few core utils gets complicated quick, and the edge cases in it makes you want to use a “proper” language. But unfortunately these scripts usually start out simple, but then organically gain more and more functionality until stuff like this happens. So I avoid writing bash scripts unless I know I won’t have to support the script long term. If I will, I use a different language

@retagainez 4 месяца назад

Yeah, bash is good for simple use cases. Its okay for doing a task that's the size of a small unit: delete a specific file here, read some logs there, read a text file, etc. Deleting multiple files in a directory definitely sounds like one of those small units of work but it's actually a lot of work once it becomes recursive and can quickly get out of hand because of the edge cases which is something a simple one-liner command doesn't make obvious once you attach a two letter option to the end of it until after you ran it. Writing a simple Python script could've helped, or Ansible if there's a lot of separate but thorough steps to be taken and abstracted to work across numerous operating systems.

@ripplerxeon 4 месяца назад

I liked how you explained and Subbed Immediately. It tell me how much you have put a lot of effort into making one. Thank you for the video and would love , if the series continues.

@ic6406 4 месяца назад

I like these series about a tiny piece of code that damaged a lot with a detailed explanation of what gone wrong. Keep going, subbed

@SullivanInfinity 4 месяца назад

Huh... I tried completely switching to Linux a few years ago. And when installing and running Steam, this actually happened to me. But only _after_ I installed Steam. I was so furious that I stopped using Ubuntu as my daily driver. I checked my drive and most of the files were gone. 5 years later and I maybe know what was the cause. Thanks for digging yourself into the topic, been very enlightening. ;)

@TheMAZZTer 4 месяца назад

Modern versions of the rm command now require a --no-preserve-root switch in order to allow you to use the command on / to prevent exactly this type of issue. Edit: Actually I think using a wildcard in /* bypasses this restriction which is why it didn't get caught! Valve doesn't know how to write Linux software? OK then I'll just go play with my Steam Deck now.

@bunny-cu9ni 4 месяца назад

That is not what no preserve root does

@erikkonstas 4 месяца назад

@@bunny-cu9niThat's exactly what it does... problem is, the path was "/*", therefore the root directory was not a removal target, "only" everything inside it was... 😂

@erikkonstas 4 месяца назад

I think I've only ever seen this on Ubuntu...

@Mitch-xo1rd 4 месяца назад

@@erikkonstasNo bash is universal on linux. This script could have gotten any distro, especially at that time.

@erikkonstas 4 месяца назад

@@Mitch-xo1rd Not all Linux distributions come with bash by default... also, I've arguably not tested hundreds, but Ubuntu was the only one which made me include --no-preserve-root (I obviously used it for mature purposes 😂).

@3rdalbum 4 месяца назад

My helpdesk system (that I mentioned in a comment last video) has an archiving system. Any ticket that was closed more than 30 days ago is archived in a different Sharepoint location and deleted from the main list. Because your channel makes me careful with my code, I implemented a check that the ticket existed in the archive before deleting it from the main ticket list. Due to race conditions caused by operating in the cloud, this didnt consistently work; the check might fail because the archive will not show the new item for up to 30 seconds. So instead I set up an email notification when tickets are added to the archive, and also when deleted from the main ticket list, and I check them manually that both operations worked. This actually helped me find an instance where somebody deleted a ticket from the main list, so this was probably the correct course of action, lol. My point is: If the employee who wrote the Steam shell script watched your videos, they probably would have diligently tried to avoid this bug, just like I did in my helpdesk software!

@Alex-jk2qy 4 месяца назад

Love the Lemmino vibe, this is such a great video! Amazing stuff, never seen anyone else do anything similar, keep it up!

@adamantii 4 месяца назад

This is one of my favorite channels, I love the topics and the presentation

@FAB1150 4 месяца назад

Every time a video of yours pops up I feel the urge to binge-watch, only to realize I have already done so when the previous video released

@GRBtutorials 4 месяца назад

And this is why I use Timeshift to take regular file system snapshots (a backup would also work if it isn’t mounted and writable, but it’d take longer to restore). If something like that ever happens, it’s a matter of minutes to roll back. Of course, they’re not a substitute for backups, as they don’t protect against hardware (HDD/SSD) failure.

@Jackpkmn 4 месяца назад

If you must use rm -rf you must also ensure that whatever function you are building cant return in such a way that it runs on root. Or on the whole user folder.

@riddixdan5572 4 месяца назад

Awesome content, learned a lot and hoping for more in less than 10 years

@InuYasha-SitBoy 4 месяца назад

you can also add an alias to your .profile/.bashrc/.zshrc for rm making it so it moves files to your trashbin or wtv instead of deleting. this way even if your comp crashes you can still recover most your files by mounting ssd/hd directly to another computer

@weakspirit_ 4 месяца назад

this wouldn't work for keyvin's problem but still a great idea for users living in the terminal

@FengLengshun 4 месяца назад

There's also rmtrash. The problem is of course that by default trash bin is pretty limited. Nevermind that it makes normal rm operations take so long, and the issues potentially caused by apps assuming rm IS rm.

@InuYasha-SitBoy 4 месяца назад

@@weakspirit_ steam could maybe chroot? hypothetically if they did chroot to a mounted drive, if there was a problem and the media unmounted would the script break? or continue running in a non chrooted env? idk, you kinda have to assume steam can handle there stuff its a pretty popular program

@averageanger7092 23 дня назад

Potentially catastrophic bug that could potentially erase all of someone's data: "Ooh! Scary!" *Does absolutely nothing about it*

@neuroplush7657 3 месяца назад

"A very scary operation." has become a potent non sequitur in my life.

@oracle372 4 месяца назад

Oh my god I cannot imagine the horror of losing that much data at once

@ouroya 4 месяца назад

glad to see one of my favorite bugs covered!!!

@easternplatypus 4 месяца назад

"# Scary!" 💀💀

@rebus_x5313 4 месяца назад

Unix engineers back in the day: Let's have a recursive rm -rf Also them: A single file tree that holds all the connected storage devices is a brilliant idea

@charliekahn4205 4 месяца назад

I'm pretty sure rm -rf exists because every bus location is on one tree. You don't want old files floating around on a single RAID drive

@meeskees702 4 месяца назад

Can’t wait to see more of this series!

@pianissimo7121 4 месяца назад

can someone explain why there was a rm -rf command in the 1st place? even for reset steam command rm -rf seems too much no?

@ParkourGrip 4 месяца назад

What command would you use to delete the the steam directory? Wouldn't that command be susceptible to same problems as "rm -rf" anyway?

@comet.x 4 месяца назад

@@ParkourGrip mv into a temp to be removed later or gvfs-trash

@khashayarr 4 месяца назад

When the guy said "my 3tb hdd where i back up everything" I seriously felt nauseous... That's so horrifying... He didn't do anything wrong...

@MrAstroKind 4 месяца назад

Love this series Kevin, keep it up! :)

@Finkelfunk 4 месяца назад

Why in gods name would you ever use rm -rf in a script? Like, you know the specific directory names, delete those specific directories one by one.

@YHK_YT 4 месяца назад

Minor inconvenience

@kormannn1 4 месяца назад

Minor programming mistake:

@delxmos 4 месяца назад

That was an interesting analysis, great work

@immortalsun 4 месяца назад

Great video! You earned yourself a sub! I thought your voice was real at first. What AI program do you use for the voice?

@__christopher__ 4 месяца назад

While this was certainly a bad bug that shouldn't have happened, I also have to ask why that user had his backup disk mounted. A backup disk should be mounted only for two occasions: when you're making a backup and when you are restoring from backup.

@Ts6451 4 месяца назад

Perhaps he had backups of his Steam games from an older system on the drive, and was planning to restore them into the new installation of Steam once he got it configured and running?

@BrunodeSouzaLino 4 месяца назад

A lot of people use their backup disk as their scratch disk too instead of having a proper scratch disk. To me sounds more like the user moved to a Linux setup with a new PC but didn't want to or didn't have space to copy his games over the "backup" drive.

@hubertnnn 4 месяца назад

Also if you have some automatic backup system then your backup drive is typically connected all the time.

@BrunodeSouzaLino 4 месяца назад

@@hubertnnn Yes, but usually you don't use it as a scratch drive or your server has drives which are used for that.

@alistair1231 4 месяца назад

this was awesome. great work!

@vladislavkaras491 4 месяца назад

It was interesting to watch about it! Thanks for the video!

@adjikuncorobhangun8063 4 месяца назад

Love the classic explosion sound effect.mp3 as always 💻💥

@bestcoolmanever 4 месяца назад

2:05 I believe Windows also has symbolic links as well, though it wasn't very readily accessible until Windows 10 iirc since I think it was originally only enabled for kernel level applications Edit: As correctly pointed out, it's actually been a feature since Vista!

@ThePlayerOfGames 4 месяца назад

Nah symlinks are available from wayyy back in Windows, you can use them to modify Paradox games whilst keeping your mods on a separate drive as far back as 7 at least. Pretty sure I've used them in Vista

@-x21- 4 месяца назад

Symbolic links go back to Vista. Hardlinks and junctions go back to windows 2000.

@albingrahn5576 4 месяца назад

didn't know this, cool!

@-x21- 4 месяца назад

@@albingrahn5576 "link shell extension" can help

@bestcoolmanever 4 месяца назад

@-x21- I probably mixed up the dates, thanks for the correction

@VulpineCortex 4 месяца назад

thanks for the vid, I've also learned some basics about linux file system along the way. Really informative, a great way to onboard anyone to IT basics

@winter4265 4 месяца назад

This was a great video and the ending was really funny. Subscribed 😄

@orangejuice732 4 месяца назад

I’m excited for this series, especially if it includes the flame wars that pop time to time on github issues threads.

@MisakaMikotoDesu 4 месяца назад

This is a great real world example of why you need offsite backups. I'm paying $3.6 a month for 1TB of storage in Germany. If you have the cash to spare it's well worth doing, even if you think it's never going to happen. Another good tip is to try backing stuff up from it just to test the backups. You don't wanna realize you forgot to include something when you actually need to go get it from backup.

@dothgaerwenoakblossom15 4 месяца назад

an untested backup is no backup

@hubertnnn 4 месяца назад

Reminds me of my previous job. Something happened and I lost the entire code I was working on for the last 2 weeks. Luckily we had daily backups of our machines. After contacting the IT guy we found out that the backup did not include the folder with our work.

@jefferson-tan 4 месяца назад

@@hubertnnndamn, that really sucks

@mr.cauliflower3536 4 месяца назад

You might just have two extra backup drives, which you switch every so often.This should be safe from getting rm rf

@MisakaMikotoDesu 4 месяца назад

@@mr.cauliflower3536 It is preferrable to use a home server or NAS, then you can use restic to backup files over SFTP, avoiding any and all issues where a rogue program deletes everything on your drives. Even a raspberry pi with a hard drive is a very good way to do local backups at home.

@kisaragi-hiu 4 месяца назад

Shell is a language that is surprisingly bad at paths considering its uses.

@Rez07 2 месяца назад

btw the music used in the video between 3:25 and 6:22 is named "LEMMiNO - Firecracker (BGM)", thank me later :D

@Peeves22 4 месяца назад

Absolutely adoring the shaking variable/command substitutions!!

@ShorkBoi 4 месяца назад

How a steam bug deleted someone's entire pc "sudo apt install steam"

@AshTronaut99 Месяц назад

Ah yes. Writing a command any time you need to open anything at all.

@Terensu-desu 4 месяца назад

I'm not sure what it is but hearing the Windows error prompt sound while looking at a Ubuntu GUI makes me chuckle every time. Can't wait for the next video in 9.9 years! Keep it up

@swaroopkunapuli1680 4 месяца назад

Lemmino "firecracker" at 3:45 was timed perfectly.

@Lugge1999 4 месяца назад

Thats the best part about programming. The # Scary comment before absolute doom. Everybody knows that the following line MIGHT fuck everything up. But we all think that with just enough sanity checks before, we are good to go! But then, one day, Murphy's Law steps in and the world burns!

@Mark-xk3hh 4 месяца назад

Something similar happened to a game on windows (and linux, but I think it only occurred on windows) called Realm of the Mad God where uninstalling the launcher would delete the entire directory it was installed to. It was even worse cause uninstalling would give the UAC prompt which is pretty common for program uninstallers, so yeah... lol

@wabbajocky8235 4 месяца назад

really? i don't remember that. i do remember the deltarune uninstaller deleting it's parent folder tho

@Mark-xk3hh 4 месяца назад

@@wabbajocky8235 It was fixed really fast but there were people who unfortunately had it happen on Reddit

@chrisdawson1776 4 месяца назад

You mean The Exalt Edition by DECA Games and yes, that was horrible I remember that a few years ago.

@3_14pie 4 месяца назад

Im impressed by how nobody but the guy who commented "scary" though rm rfing a variable directory could be a bad idea

@johnnynojokes 4 месяца назад

Love your channel man, keep it up. This is awesome.

@kinershah464 4 месяца назад

The issue is that script writers are usually too lazy to check for command outputs. Setting the flag at the top of the script to exit on any failure is one good way to avoid problems. Another thing is to add logs, but yeah since it deleted the everything the log file may get deleted as well. Anyways, interesting bug and quite scary indeed.

@alex_zetsu 4 месяца назад

I still don't get how the steamroot ended up empty string which caused the deletion

@bierrollerful 4 месяца назад

@@alex_zetsu The command that should have returned the path to the steam root directory failed, so the variable $STEAMROOT was left as the default value, which is an empty string.

@realcartoongirl 4 месяца назад

i thought you had to run with root to delete root directory

@frost.-xn2bp 4 месяца назад

yo this is so cool, i clicked thinking: "no way ill watch all of this" and when i watched the video. i found myself commenting this and i realized it was about to end. your way of making videos is really, really engaging and its fun to watch, keep it up. 👍

@mohamad20zx34 4 месяца назад

Congratulations for your first video of the issue tracker series Kevin

@jonasdatlas4668 4 месяца назад

someone at steam had a *really* bad day because of this i’m sure lol

@stxnw 4 месяца назад

It was not introduced by a Valve employee but by a Mechanical Engineering student from the University of Columbia.

@jordaniliev6570 4 месяца назад

No, way, I was just rewatching the giltab video :D

@AEtherPi 4 месяца назад

Very interesting series idea! I'm excited for more. Subed

@KatJustice97 4 месяца назад

No joke this video taught me more about Linux than anything else I've come across. I'm a complete and utter novice with command lines, but this was incredibly digestible. Well done, thank you!