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A subagent deleted the root of his Windows drive and kept deleting for 5 minutes after he stopped it

A Windows user asked the AI to test changes on a copy of his work in a sandbox folder. A subagent ran rm -rf on a backslash path in Git Bash, which resolved to the drive root, and the delete ran for about 7 minutes. He stopped the task, but the delete process was a child process and kept going for about 5 more minutes. He got his files back from a Windows shadow copy.

This one went wrong. Read what happened so you don’t hit the same problem.

How it works

  1. Asks for sandbox testing
  2. Subagent runs rm -rf on a path that resolves to the drive root
  3. Delete runs about 7 minutes
  4. He stops the task
  5. The child delete process keeps running about 5 more minutes
  6. Files restored from a shadow copy

Why it’s worth knowing

Stopping the task did not stop the deletion, because the delete ran as a child process the stop never reached.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on github.com. See the original ↗

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