“Yeah… I was very tired that night.”

The (un)installation bug from the previous post was an overeager directory delete, but a more common problem I’ve seen is this one. Here’s an example from iTunes 2.0: The installer tries to erase a previous version of iTunes using (with root privileges) the rm -rf command. However it doesn’t take into account that volume names can contain spaces. […] When the diskname (partition name) starts with a space the following happens: rm -rf /Volumes/ harddiskname/iTunes.app 2> /dev/null So rm removes /Volumes (all mount points!) and a nonexistent path harddiskname/iTunes.app, but no errors are displayed because they are /dev/​nulled. And a very similar thing a decade later, from Steam’s Linux installer: I launched Steam. It did not launch, it offered to let me browse, and still could not find it when I pointed to the new location. Steam crashed. I restarted it. It re-installed itself and everything looked great. Until I looked and saw that steam had apparently deleted everything owned by my…