From: Chris Ruprecht (chris_at_ruprecht.org)
Date: Wed Apr 16 2003 - 13:27:33 PDT
On Wednesday 16 April 2003 14:22, Alexander Schreiber wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 03:11:20AM -0500, John Acuff wrote:
> > On Tuesday, April 15, 2003, at 04:32 PM, Matthew Robinson wrote:
> > > the whole world is waiting for you to type
> > >
> > > rm -rf /
> > >
> > > and bury your head in your hands...
> > >
> > > M :-)
> >
> > I gather this is a "Bad Thing"? For the benefit of us non-Unix heads,
It's a pretty bad thing, if you actually like to have a working machine.
> > what exactly does this do? My guess is that it does something really
> > nasty to your hard drive.........
>
> Totally wipe out your machine.
>
> rm is the delete command, the commandline switches "-rf" tell it to
> operate recursively and to force all operations (== "Do what I told you
> and ask no questions") and / is the root of the UNIX filesystem.
>
> Therefore, "rm -rf /" deletes _all_ files and all _all_ directories on
> _all_ mounted filesystems. And since UNIX works along a "you get what
[snip]
Well, it will not actually delete everything. The moment it deleted the rm
command, usually in /bin, it can go no further. But there are work-arounds
for that, I can provide you with another method to shoot yourself in the
foot, if you like ;).
On the up side: rm usually does a pretty good job before it erases itself, so
it's safe to say that you should have an install disk ready, by the time you
get the error message ...
Best regards,
Chris
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