A few days ago I was struggling to install CS2 on my MacBook Pro. For whatever reason, it just would not install on my system in either user account. Each failed attempt took about 30 minutes before crapping out. Adobe’s CS2 uninstall instructions should be embarrassing, especially for a $22.36B company selling a $1600 product.

So anyway, I start writing a shell script which goes through and rips out all the tidbits of CS2 that Adobe’s installer barfs all over the hard drive. Nothing fancy, just a list of rm -rf statements pointing a dozen or so various spots around the volume.

I’m also feeding Noemi while Lila takes her afternoon milk break and watches Blue’s Clues.

Long story short, I got interrupted typing out the location of the last remove statement. Interruption causes me to forget that I was in the middle of typing something. I come back to the keyboard, try to remember where I was and decide to run the script, to, you know, see what still needed deleting. Where did I leave off? Here:

And then my entire home folder happily deleted itself.

I back up frequently (though not frequently enough) and luckily only lost a few dozen emails I’d filed the day before. Still, I did get to enjoy that moment of tunnel-vision panic where all the blood in my face seemed to rush to the back of my neck.

Could have been a total catastrophe, it wasn’t because I had a very recent backup. I recommend SuperDuper! without hesitation.

Update: The installation problem turned out to be related to a Quicktime update. Adobe and Apple straightened it out and I had no trouble with a recent CS2 install onto a new MacBook Pro at IOP. My original installation succeeded because I chose not to install Version Cue, which we’ve never used anyway.