Can undefined behavior erase the hard drive?

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Can it? Sure. Happened to me, in fact.

I wrote code to delete a temporary directory. That involved creating a recursive delete <temp directory>\*.* command. Due to a bug, the <temp directory> field wasn’t always filled in. Our file system code happily executed the recursive delete \*.* command.

My colleagues noticed when the icons on their desktop suddenly disappeared. Took out two machines.

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