this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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    [–] [email protected] 186 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

    --no-preserve-root is a security option to keep you from accidentally removing all your files. Make sure you always use it along side the -f option and -r which stands for rescue - meaning rm will create a rescue copy of the deleted data.

    [–] [email protected] 86 points 1 year ago (2 children)
    [–] MyNameIsIgglePiggle 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    I see you also know Lionel Hutz

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

    Is he related to Miguel Sanchez?

    [–] darcy 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    the / means 'working directory only', a security feature to prevent accidently using absolute paths.

    [–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago
    [–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    Use sudo before rm to improve efficiency.

    [–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    Sudo is short for “super do”, which means “do this at super speed”

    [–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

    Too bad they never added the lu to make it sudolu , to execute at ludicrous speed

    [–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I’m very new to Linux; could you explain what this does for me?

    [–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    -r means delete recursively. rm will by default only remove files, but with this flag, it'll also delete all the folders, subfolders, and the files in those.

    --no-preserve-root disables a security check. A few years ago, this flag didn't exist. If you ran rm -r /, everything on your system would be deleted, provided the user had permissions. Now, / is treated specially and rm will refuse to perform a recursive delete on it without the --no-preserve-root flag.

    -f means force and disables any prompts.

    rm -rf --no-preserve-root / would delete every file on your system.

    [–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    Thank you! That’s funny and horrifying, as a complete newbie.

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    I installed Ubuntu on a spare computer a few weeks ago just to rm -rf / it. It was quite fun seeing the os slowly killing itself :)

    [–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

    You should try dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda some time :P

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    Should I ask what it does before or after I use it? :)

    [–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    Fills the hard drive with randomly-generated garbage.

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

    Specifically, most likely the OS hard drive, since that's usually sda

    [–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

    --no-preserve-root

    disables the wipe your system protection. Without this option rm can only wipe current directory if you input / as a location.

    -f

    means force, will not prompt the user for any reason.

    -r

    means recursive, rm will enter any directory selected and delete all the contents.

    rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

    The above command WILL wipe your system. It will delete all files your user has access to, and it will give you no feedback warning you what's going on. Be careful.

    [–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

    Oh jeebus! Hahaha. Thank you so much for the explanation! I am extremely careful in terminal. I don’t find myself there often now that I’ve got my web apps set up.

    Now to learn how to successfully install something using Docker… There’s so many VARIABLES in Portainer to get something installed! I have not had one success as of yet, but I’m only on my first week of learning. Got it running as a file server successfully, though!

    Every TV in my house now gets King of the Hill RANDOMIZER and it’s bliss.

    [–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

    OML, this is excellent.
    Please, is there a !shitty_linux_advice community?

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

    Some poor soul is going to take this to the bank and have a horrible day. You could have at least told them to use the -p flag to protect any critical system files from being removed.