this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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    Trust me bro! (sopuli.xyz)
    submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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    [–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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

    [–] [email protected] 36 points 2 years 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 2 years ago (1 children)

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

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years 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 :)

    [–] Revan343 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

    [–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

    Fills the hard drive with randomly-generated garbage.

    [–] Revan343 3 points 2 years ago

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

    [–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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 2 years 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.