18 month job hunt is pretty rough, I get that he really wanted this but for most people with "normal" lives outside work this would be a very risky move.
A long time ago I started working at this company and I fat fingered 'rm -rf /' instead with a dot.
When realizing what I had done and it was taking too long I powered off the machine.
When I told the sysops he looked horrified and asked me how far it got.
The fun thing was all websites and data where mounted from the server to each workstation to make it easy to update source code.