Rogue Line of Code Nearly Derailed a Toy Story Movie

With Toy Story 5 now in theaters, the Wall Street Journal 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—it 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.

The rescue hinged on supervising technical director Galyn Susman—who, 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, which digs into the offending line of code: /bin/rm -r -f *