{"id":882818,"date":"2026-06-21T13:52:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T13:52:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/882818\/"},"modified":"2026-06-21T13:52:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T13:52:14","slug":"rogue-line-of-code-nearly-derailed-a-toy-story-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/882818\/","title":{"rendered":"Rogue Line of Code Nearly Derailed a Toy Story Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n With Toy Story 5<\/a> now in theaters, the Wall Street Journal<\/a> revisits a tech catastrophe that nearly derailed the franchise before the second film came out. Ben Cohen recounts how Toy Story 2 was almost wiped out in 1998 by a single, misfired Unix command\u2014it literally deleted 90% of the film in a few seconds. The studio’s backup system (this was long before cloud computing) should have saved the day, but it had malfunctioned. “You don’t often watch a company vaporize in front of your eyes,” says technical director Oren Jacob. Cohen describes it as an “existential” problem for Pixar: The movie would miss its theatrical release window at a time when the company couldn’t afford that kind of delay. \n <\/p>\n


\n The rescue hinged on supervising technical director Galyn Susman\u2014who, because she had a newborn and a home workstation, happened to have the only full copy of the film on a computer in her house. Cohen details the frantic dash to retrieve that machine, and the oh-so-careful drive back to the studio with the computer “strapped into the back seat of a Volvo” after police declined to provide an escort. “Susman, Jacob and a small team of Pixar employees then spent a weekend inspecting 30,000 files, fueled by way too much pizza and coffee poured by (Pixar co-founder Ed) Catmull and Pixar’s chairman: Steve Jobs.” Read the full story<\/a>, which digs into the offending line of code: \/bin\/rm -r -f * <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With Toy Story 5 now in theaters, the Wall Street Journal revisits a tech catastrophe that nearly…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":882819,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,46961,53,3721,88478,179294,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-882818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-linux","tag-movies","tag-pixar","tag-steve-jobs","tag-toy-story","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/882819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}