In Linux, everything is a file.
So if you have a problem, it will be in a file somewhere.
So logically every problem can be equalled to one or more files.
Therefore it follows: no files = no problems. And no problems = no headache.
Everything that does something is a file. No files, no existence ;)
Why doesn’t rm -rf /* also require —no-preserve-root? That seems just as easy to type accidentally and will just nuke your system without asking
If you try to put in safeguards for every possible system-nuking command someone with root rights might type, you’ll never get done.
When you’re typing “rm -rf” as root, you should immediately stop and triple-check what you’re doing.
Cause either there’s a safer way to do what you want to do, or what you’re trying isn’t a good idea in the first place.(Even when you want to delete lots of stuff in root space, a better way is to use
find. You can use it to look for and list the files you want to delete. After you’ve checked its output and verified that those are the correct files, just cursor-up to get the samefindquery again and add --delete at the end)Can confirm. Accidentally did that a few weeks ago.
I am curious how. If you were deleting everything in the local directory you wouldn’t need the ./ before the asterisk, so was it some sort of piping that messed it up?
I was cleaning a usb and didn’t want to reformat it.
Once upon a time, I accidentally created a folder named “~” in my home folder (the company provided scripting framework would inconsistently expand variables, so the folder had a ton of stuff inside it).
I ran “rm -rf ~” and only panicked when I started to wonder why it wasn’t taking too long.
Good news is that it only managed to get halfway through my local checkout of aosp before I stopped it. Bad news was that it nuked most of my dotfiles.
You forgot the
-rjust like always.
WARNING:
Don’t ever do this on a current bare metal system!
Even if you have everything backed up, plan on re-installing anyway, and just want to see what happens.On a modern EFI system, recursively deleting everything (including the EFI path) has a chance of permanently hard-bricking your computer!
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402But Windows 95/XP does not run on EFI systems, so they aren’t used in the BRD. We’re save!
Plus no ads, and MUCH more efficiently written code to boot - win-win!
Just don’t hook it up to the Internet…
We only need fax anyway. So we print stuff out, and fax it.
Why would it be a permanent brick? Shouldn’t a flashdrive and access to BIOS be enough to get your PC working again?
