I was just wondering what everyone's worst mistakes were when using search and replace. Personally, my biggest blunder happened when I was updating country codes at the beginning of a list of phone numbers. I totally forgot to check if the codes were also appearing elsewhere in the phone numbers themselves. Anyone else have a cringe-worthy experience to share?
4 Answers
Years ago, while I was figuring out Linux, I decided to update a file in /etc. Somehow, I ended up replacing the contents of every single file in /etc! I still have no idea how I did it, and luckily it was on a lab machine.
When making significant changes, always remember that hitting CTRL+Z isn't a foolproof solution. It's a good idea to make a copy to test first. I've learned these lessons the hard way, and trust me, it adds a few gray hairs!
I have a trick I use now—whenever I copy and paste, I always ensure there's a backup. You never know when a simple "F2 - filename_yyyymmdd.ext" will save you from disaster!
I once deleted the security groups for our SCCM setup, which took down the patching infrastructure for around 30,000 users. I had the groups I meant to keep in my clipboard instead of the ones I wanted to delete. After a frantic call from a team lead about the logs, I restored everything, but boy did that suck!
I can relate! I once mass-updated the employee numbers for all users in Active Directory to 11111 by mistake instead of just the blank ones. Thankfully, I had the sense to do an export beforehand, and after ten minutes of a sweaty panic, I managed to restore everything.