this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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    Trust me bro! (sopuli.xyz)
    submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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    [–] [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