ChatGPT 5.3 Codex erases entire hard drive thanks to tiny error

[Redaktion]

Small mistake, big impact. A misplaced backslash caused a PowerShell script running on GPT to completely erase the hard drive contents for a Reddit user. A simple "typo" that could have happened to anyone reveals that it's not just vibecoding that is prone to errors.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/ChatGPT-5-3-Codex-erases-entire-hard-drive-thanks-to-tiny-error.1231484.0.html

[jdrch]

vulnerability of the Windows command line. The fact that a simple typo in character masking can be translated into a catastrophic delete command for an entire root directory without any additional safety nets is a problem. A much safer approach is to use only native PowerShell commands, which process paths much more robustly and prevent such drastic translation errors between different interpreter levels. However, even here there are simple commands that can wipe entire hard drives.

WTF are you talking about? Every OS' command line allows the user to force wipe the entire storage via single unintentional command. This was 100% user stupidity and had nothing to do with "Windows" or cmd.

[Adelaide]

vulnerability of the Windows command line. The fact that a simple typo in character masking can be translated into a catastrophic delete command for an entire root directory without any additional safety nets is a problem. A much safer approach is to use only native PowerShell commands, which process paths much more robustly and prevent such drastic translation errors between different interpreter levels. However, even here there are simple commands that can wipe entire hard drives.

WTF are you talking about? Every OS' command line allows the user to force wipe the entire storage via single unintentional command. This was 100% user stupidity and had nothing to do with "Windows" or cmd.

Most modern versions of Linux's "rm" actually have more safety features built in to prevent accidentally wiping unintended files and folders; also, unless you're incredibly stupid and do a super user rm AND configured it to not require manual authentication to run super user commands, you can't wipe the OS/system files.

[dacjames]

> The fact that a simple typo in character masking can be translated into a catastrophic delete command for an entire root directory without any additional safety nets is a problem.

Nah, it's fine. Adding preserve-root like windows would be nice but it's absence is not really a problem. WSL2 has it already.

If you're a professional, you should have your machine and workflow setup to recover from a total system failure with minimal disruption. You're committing all your code and using external storage (cloud or otherwise) for anything you care about loosing, right?!

This error would cost me a day productivity, at most two. Annoying but nowhere close to "catastrophic." Everyone learns this lesson eventually.