this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
873 points (98.4% liked)

linuxmemes

21103 readers
1754 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!

    founded 1 year ago
    MODERATORS
    [email protected]
    [email protected]
    [email protected]
    873
    Trust me bro! (sopuli.xyz)
    submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
    62 comments fedilink hide all child comments
     
    you are viewing a single comment's thread
    view the rest of the comments
    [–] [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