this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
273 points (80.8% liked)
linuxmemes
21465 readers
1485 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudo
in Windows. - No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Does this really work? Wouldn't
rm
remove itself in/bin
early in the process?I think it would continue even after it's own deletion as the binary is already loaded into memory, so process is not dependent on the file system. Still doubt that it'll complete successfully. Most likely the system crashes in the middle.
I thought - - no-preserve root also needed to be added as an argument for self destruct to completely work.
Yes, though you could also do
rm -rf /*
afaik to not need--no-preserve-root
Edit: I just realized that the
*
is already in the meme. So this should already work as is. Alternatively you could always use the good old way of "act now and remove all French roots of your system:rm -fr / --no-preserve-root
"i dont get why you can't just do
sudo rm -fr /
because it won't let you do that:
That’s not the reason why it continues. It’s because there’s still a file descriptor open to
rm
.In Unix/Linux, a removed file only disappears when the last file descriptor to it is gone. As long as the file
/usr/bin/rm
is still opened by a process (and it is, because it is running) it will not actually be deleted from disk from the perspective of that process.This also why removing a log file that's actively being written to doesn't clear up filesystem space, and why it's more effective to truncate it instead. ( e.g. Run
> /var/log/myhugeactivelogfile.log
instead ofrm /var/log/myhugeactivelogfile.log
), or why Linux can upgrade a package that's currently running and the running process will just keep chugging along as the old version, until restarted.Sometimes you can even use this to recover an accidentally deleted file, if it's still held open in a process. You can go to
/proc/$PID/fd
, where$PID
is the process ID of the process holding the file open, and find all the file descriptors it has in use, and then copy the lost content from there.rm doesn't remove memory in RAM
That’s not the reason why it continues. It’s because there’s still a file descriptor open to
rm
.Since you forgot to add - - preserve-root It won't go too far. But at some point the system wants to load a file that is deleted and the kernel will panic. System crash. Delete incomplete. But rest assured, the important stuff is gone.
Go on then ... try it.
Or don't because you will erase your system. (Hint: it's in the asterisk)
Or was it non preserve. I never tried it though. I guess a vm should be fine to test it. On the other hand I don't care enough.
The flag is called
--no-preserve-root
, but the flag wouldn't do anything here because you're not deleting root (/
), you're deleting all non-hidden files and directories under root (/*
), and rm will just let you do it.Pretty sure it's --no-preserve-root or something similar.