***ZZZaaaaapppp*** (Tragedy in coding)
 

A 9 hour workday, gone in an instant.

Why? Because I didn't compile once today. No compiles, no saves.

Inexplicably Xemacs pops up a window while I am typing and I press spacebar accidentally. Buh bye 9 hours of development. I didn't even get to read the dialog box it all happened so fast.

The backup file disappeared, and it seems like auto-saving was on, but there are no auto-save files. The one that existed disappeared from the directory.

*whimpers*

What kind of moron maps a plain spacebar to a "revert all the work you've done today" dialog box!

I remember the days when emacs forced you to type an explicit yes or no answer before screwing over your whole project!

Share your stories...

Oh man. Such a bummer.

I usually prefer losing work to power outages and things. But when one of your colleagues yanks last night's copy of a file out of CVS and FTPs it over top of the version you've been coding on all day... well, that's a pretty good way to lose data too.

I've had similar problems when using a VAX/VMS system for cobol work.

Buggy peice of shit system.... it can compile fine and run programs fine, but editing files.. bad.

back up often, silly man!

Yep. Exactly. Well, I don't so much back files up as compulsively save every 2 minutes. Way too many experiences losing hard work. I can understand really getting into an editing session, but ... wow, 9 hours. Sorry to hear about that.

"Those who do not save their keystrokes are doomed to repeat them." Words to live by.

(edit: not an insult to kel.)

I relied on auto-save.

The problem being that the dialog box that popped up was the one for restoring the auto-saved file...

And for some wacked out reason even though auto-save was on, it reverted to a file from the beginning of the day!

I don't know what it is about me, but when I code, I hit Ctrl+s (or Ctrl+x Ctrl+s in emacs) after about every line of code that I write. If I'm making a major change, I always backup the code I'm working on incase I mess something up before hand. I honestly can't remember when it was, but I'm sure the same thing happened to me at some point and I had to redo hours of work. It sucks, but live and learn dude.

CVS is your friend. Even if you only run a local CVS server, it's a godsend. I frequently - even while writing papers for (to use an example) English class - will submit work I'm doing to my CVS tree on another computer I have. And then I have a shell script set up to make daily backups of the CVSROOT directory to yet another machine.

Redudancy is good, when it comes to important data.

i save more often than i compile(abour 5 times as many)

I use pico and bash, in a single console...
so, I save all the time I need to compile thankfully. And I also play with RCS when doing my main coding...

I can not figure out how to emacs for the life of me. Sorry for ya, dude.

Do you guys all use linux for jobs or for personal use?

I use it for both....


Once when typing in vim i was trying to type the number 8 and I I hit it a few times (the console was lagging bad) so i bashed it a good number of times, I then realized I wasn't in insert mode. anyways I quickly got to the correct mode and typed in my 8 and shift ZZ quickly to save and exit. Well the 8's I was pushing got interpreted into repeat values I managed to overwrite the entire source code with 8's and save and exit. To make matters worse it wasin't in insert mode but overwrite mode. Luckily I hadn't been working very long and was able to recover very quickly.

I bounce back and forth between Pico and Emacs, and thankfully I haven't run into a situation like that before. It does seem like an extremely stupid way to map out keys, though. Sorry to hear about it bud

I was tired, and having some trouble with java code, so I decided to delete all the class files.

I typed del *.java and pressed enter.

D'Oh. Three weeks' work destroyed, with only 2 days to the deadline.

Luckily I had a recent (2-hour) backup, but what a pain.

I have a couple more good stories

A couple days ago a friend of mine accidently ran a normal file as a script, well that file had the word touch in it or something which caused a bunch of files to be created with a question mark at the end.

So he decideds to try and delete all the files by typing rm *?
(Delete all files that have at least one character)
:)


A professor of mine while in grad school was cleaning up his directories and wanted to delete all the files in his directory that ended in .o

So he types rm -r *.o (so he thinks)

but he mistakingly was pressing the shift key still when he pressed the period so the command he typed was

rm -r *>o
(Delete all files and redirect the output to a file called o)