this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
765 points (91.2% liked)

linuxmemes

21340 readers
1194 users here now

Hint: :q!


Sister communities:


Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

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
    [–] Barbarian 48 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

    No, this is a very old joke that uses the fact the command has "fr" in it to trick people about what the command does. Joking aside, here's what the command actually does:

    rm is the command to delete files and folders

    -f is the force modifier. This means it'll keep going even if it encounters problems and just delete as much as it can

    -r is the recursive modifier. That means it'll go down every folder it sees in the target and delete the contents as well, and delete the contents of folders of folders, etc.

    / is the target. This is the root of the filesystem. If you're used to Windows, that's like targeting C:.

    Put it all together, and this command basically deletes your whole filesystem. A safeguard was put in place a while back due to people meming about this and causing newbies to delete their whole system. Now it won't work unless you put in --no-preserve-root, which tells rm that yes, you really mean it, please delete my whole system.

    /* as the target works around that safeguard, because technically deleting everything in root is not the same as deleting root itself.

    [–] Mouselemming 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

    Oh, like a more sophisticated version of the old "put your phone in the microwave"joke!

    Thank you, kind person.

    [–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

    Or the less destructive, "Press Alt+F4 to triforce."

    [–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)
    [–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago