A Coding Mishap Nearly Wiped Out A Beloved Pixar Masterpiece

“Toy Story 2” almost didn’t exist, thanks to one string of code that deleted the entire movie.

“Toy Story” is a massively successful franchise. Its fifth installment, “Toy Story 5,” premiered Friday. But in 1998, Pixar nearly lost “Toy Story 2” when an employee accidentally erased it from the company’s servers, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The code culprit was a short command: /bin/rm-r-f*. That command directed the chosen server to delete all of its files immediately, without requesting permission, the Journal reported. 

Technical employees used it to free up storage in their personal directories, but since they could also access the “Toy Story 2” master drive, it was easy to input the command in the wrong place.

Technical Director Oren Jacob was working on the film in Pixar’s Richmond, California, offices when the files disappeared from his computer, according to the Journal. Pixar had lost about 90% of the movie.

“You don’t often watch a company vaporize in front of your eyes,” Jacob told the Journal.

Pixar planned to release the movie in theaters, and any delay would have been catastrophic for the company, according to co-founder Ed Catmull.

“We didn’t have the resources at that time to absorb that kind of delay and survive,” Catmull told the Journal.

Catmull focused on finding a solution instead of someone to blame.

Looking for someone to blame doesn’t help us learn from mistakes,” he told the Journal. “We understood that the deletion of the movie was an accident because somebody typed in a command when they were in the wrong directory. We don’t know who typed the command, or if they even knew that they were the one who did it, but it didn’t matter.

Supervising Technical Director Galyn Susman initially thought Pixar could recover the film from the company’s backups — only to discover the backup systems had also failed.

Then Susman realized she had a backup on her home computer, the Journal reported. She had created a work-from-home setup while on maternity leave. She would take the computer to the Pixar offices once a week and download the latest copy of the movie so she could continue working on it.

Susman and Jacob transported the computer from Susman’s home to the office and were able to restore the movie’s files.

After recovering the movie, however, the studio deleted it again — on purpose this time — and completely overhauled it less than a year before its release date, according to the Journal. The do-over worked, and the film became incredibly successful.

“Personally, I still think ‘Toy Story 2’ is the best of the franchise,” Susman told the Journal.