Just deleted 40,000 images with a single command

Lounge
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Having been a Windows user for a while, I have just recently began to dabble with running commands in cmd, mostly for basic image format conversion, and batch processing of raw files using Rawtherapee-cli for raw video.

Anyway, after I transcode the tiff sequences from Rawtherapee-cli to 10 bit video clips for video editing, I am left with all these extra tiff files. Usually, I do a search for tiff, and delete in the windows file browser gui, but this time I felt more adventurous and daring, so I deleted all the tiff files in my external hard drive (G:) currently dedicated only to this video project, with one command.

Quite a bold move, and afterwards, I just had just cleared out about 480 GB of intermediary files, and I just had to type a more humorous command,
echo Whew Lad!

Whew%20Lad!
Whew%20Lad!1797Ă—1440 3.4 MB

Edit: removed the actual command from the post as this is quite a “Do Not Try at Home” kind of deal.

1 Like
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Good thing you didn’t make a typo!

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Yeah, I would never do something like this on the main drive for obvious reasons. But this is an external drive.

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Yeah, it would be very bad if I spelled “Whew lad!” incorrectly… LOL!

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“…with great power comes great responsibility…” (Star Wars quote??)

I’ve witnessed the bricking of servers where a path was typed with a space character that didn’t belong…

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Yeah, exactly why I’d never do that on the main drive with the os.

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What was the aftermath? Were they able to recover the servers?

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What??? Glenn, that is minus ten nerd points :wink:

Spiderman. Uncle Ben. :stuck_out_tongue:

3 Likes
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There are Bens in Star Wars too. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Yeah, I saw that was a Spiderman thing from cheating with Wikipedia. Spiderman was no doubt the seed that popped this phrase into pop culture consciousness, but this sentiment has surfaced before in different iterations since, according to the article, biblical times.

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Ground-up re-install.

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S’alright, I know where stand I there. Played Star Wars Trivia with my kid once, and didn’t get one answer correct…

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I can only say “whew lad!”

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I doubt I’d fare any better.