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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

It's not a "hoax" in any sense. Just a plain lie. A hoax has to be fairly large-scale and affect a lot of people (negatively). The original question contained no hyper-links at all. (Ironically, one was inserted by subsequent editors).

The question is plausible. I once deleted a /lib directory due to a misspelled variable in a script! Recovery consisted of copying libs from another installation of the same OS.

ServerFault appears to complaining that the question is generating traffic --- to ServerFault!?

If we look at the user's account, it's clean. Only through a LinkedIn reference do we see that "bleemboy" is Marco Marsala. Like, what fraction of visitors are clicking through all that?

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> I once deleted a /lib directory due to a misspelled variable in a script!

Ah yes, the old "rm -rf $TEMPBASEEDIR/lib" bug. It is so easy to have that happen.

Or like I did, write a script that assumes a certain environment variable is set outside the script... and then forget to set the variable before running it!

To prevent these problems, use "set -u" at the top of your bash scripts. This will halt the script instead of silently inserting an empty string if you use an undefined variable.

"set -e" (halt on nonzero return code) and "set -o pipefail" (propagate error returns through a pipe) are also useful options, or combine them with:

  set -euo pipefail

Here's a great article that describes these options and some tips for using them:

http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/

Yes; that was around the time I started using "set -u" with religious devotion.

That is a great article. I just strictified the cheeky shell scripts that automate deployment of my current project.

But make sure you read up on the problems with `set -e` before you rely on it!

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105

I think it has affected a lot of people. hundred of thousands read that question. friends who are not programmers sent me links to that question and asked me to not do the same. people lost their time answering and finding solutions.

it was a hoax. a troll. not very far away from screaming bomb on an train.

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