Cowork deleted 35,000 files from a Mac desktop on first use
Asked to organise the Desktop folder, Cowork ran rm -rf on a path containing a space, which deleted everything on the Desktop. The files were iCloud cloud-only, so Time Machine had no copy and the deletion had already synced to iCloud.
Paths with spaces are a classic rm -rf trap. Cloud-only files are not a backup: a deletion syncs everywhere at once.
The full story
On their first use of Cowork, the user asked Claude to organise their Mac's Desktop folder. It ran rm -rf on a single folder whose name contained a space, correctly quoted, through Cowork's FUSE mount. Instead of that one folder, everything on the Desktop was deleted: more than 35,000 files.
The files were stored in iCloud as cloud-only, so Time Machine had no copy, and by the time the user reached iCloud's restore tool the deletion had synced there too.
The user filed a bug report with logs and warns others not to give Cowork access to the Desktop or any folder without a local backup.
How it was done
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: Cowork deleted my entire Mac Desktop Folder on first use - 35,000+ files 😳
The user's post in r/ArtificialInteligence with the exact command from the logs.
The poster has deleted it, but the original is still readable (it can take a few seconds to load): archived copy of Reddit: Cowork deleted my entire Mac Desktop Folder on first use - 35,000+ files 😳 (opens in a new tab)