Batch file automated a clean-up job, then fouled itself by deleting the wrong directory

SOFTWARE

It survived testing and the boss signed off, so who was really to blame?

WHO, ME? Welcome to another installment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column in which The Register opens the working week with your tales of IT woe.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Pascal," who once worked for a company that had just acquired its first Exchange server, home to around 600 mailboxes.

"The IT manager was keen we kept on top of the performance of the Information Store and suggested we take the box offline once a week to defrag it," Pascal told The Register.

That sounded like a sensible idea, so Pascal wrote a batch file to stop the Information Store, run eseutil /d to compact the database, delete the temporary files created during the process, and restart the service

"It tested OK and did make a difference to the size of the Store, so we scheduled it to run on the Friday night and left for the weekend," he told Who, Me?

Pascal didn't make it far into the weekend before his phone started buzzing with reports that Exchange had stopped working.

"I drove into work to check and found the Windows NT 4 server wasn't happy. Hardly anything would run, and the services for Exchange had stopped," he confessed to The Register.

Pascal quickly spotted the problem. His script contained the command DEL *.* but did not specify a directory. Running from the System32 folder, it therefore began deleting files there.

"My script wiped most of the System32 files, and that meant Windows NT 4 was lobotomized and the server was beyond repair," Pascal wrote. "It needed a full rebuild and restore, which took me most of the weekend."

Looking back, Pascal accepts that it wasn't his finest hour. It was at least a lucrative one: he received double time to fix it. Pascal deleted System32 without deleting his career.

Have you deleted something important by mistake? Before your brain erases the memory of your shame, click here to send your story to Who, Me? Perhaps we'll restore it in full on a future Monday. ®