revDeleteFolder and Lessons Learned..

[David Burgun]

Owwwww, that's just horrible!

I tend to develop code that can do lasting dammage on either a 
seperate hard disk or another machine, it's really bad news 
developing code on your "everyday" work machine.

Either that or have all my files backed up in a Source Control 
Database in  server.

I reckon that a change is in order for this. How about a Global 
property - "confirmDeletes" (true/false) ? This would be defaulted to 
true. Or maybe a "recurseFolders" (true/false) which would control if 
folders inside folders should be deleted.

All the Best
Dave

>Here's an interesting story:
>
>Last night I was working on a 'reset prefs' handler which was to 
>remove all the files in a folder.
>
>It looked something like:
>
>on resetPrefs
>   put lMasterFolderPath & "/" & lProjectName into tFolderToDelete
>   revDeleteFolder tFolderToDelete
>end resetPrefs
>
>lMasterFolderPath and lProjectNames are script locals.
>
>I also have a handler 'checkLocals' which I should've put at the 
>top, but I digress.
>
>In anycase, after applying the script and running, of course the 
>script locals are now nulls and the revDeleteFolder contained only a 
>single "/", which apparently means: "Delete the entire route hard 
>drive".
>
>After running it and seeing the processor shoot to 100% and stay 
>there, I guessed something was wrong. I tried to quit it, but it's a 
>shell script and even the task manager wouldn't allow me to kill it.
>
>By the time I was able to force shutdown my machine, most the entire 
>Windows partition was wasted. Fortunately, my Linux partition was 
>still good and I could access my Documents folder and grab most of 
>the stuff that mattered, but of course WinXP was completely hosed.
>
>My lesson learned is NEVER, NEVER, NEVER use revDeleteFolder. I 
>rewrote the script to use 'the files' and delete each file 
>individually.
>
>Hope others can learn from my mistake!
>
>best,
>
>Chipp