Comments on: Fun with Linux Commands-II – With Power Comes Responsibility

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 01:00:32 +0000

It didn’t work for me, can you give us some more information?

By: Pigpoo

Pigpoo — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:47:40 +0000

Today, basicly I did “su; cd /; rm -f -d -r *” on my iPhone.
Well… Guess what happened.

By: Raghu

Raghu — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:51:56 +0000

Work as a normal user. Never do your regular work as root.

\rm -rf / does not do any harm if you are a normal user and not root.

By: Tim Bowden

Tim Bowden — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:30:31 +0000

Of course rm -rf / has a purpose. Working in a chroot? Can come in handy if you want to clean it out. There shouldn’t be limits on things like this because that would violate the principle of least surprise for people who /do/ know what they’re doing.

By: Werner

Werner — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 16:30:53 +0000

The rm -rf / command serves no purpose. The only reason would be to re-install an operating system and the partitioner would remove the old filesystem. Linux is powerful – but dangerous in this regard. Some kind of safeguard would be a good idea with a command such as this…but then again Linux and other *nixes are not for the totally inexperienced. You need to do you’re homework before playing with these commands.

By: Willy G

Willy G — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 15:32:00 +0000

I wish there were a lot more of this information available. simple but useful DON”Ts we need a lot more

By: Alan

Alan — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 03:18:31 +0000

Thanks for getting the word out. I can add a few more:

– redirecting things into a hard drive, e.g.: cat /dev/zero > /dev/sda
– using dd with a drive or system file as the output, e.g.:
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda
– rsync or any similar copy command that has a delete switch can be used to destroy parts of the filesystem:
rsync -r –delete /tmp /usr

Of course, you can’t know them all, it’s best just to avoid running things you don’t understand from people you can’t trust.

By: Kinox

Kinox — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 01:54:20 +0000

rm -rf ~ / & deletes not just your home directory, but the whole root.