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remon@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• 0xKesh@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Unless it’s on /, where preserve-root should be kicking in, unless the bypass flag is used (can’t remember this one)

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  • Havatra@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Not all systems have the preserve-root flag enforced, actually… I accidentally did the rm -rf / in a bash script (the variable for the path returned empty), and it irreversibly deleted a bunch of my system, including sudo and a big part of /etc, before I realized and did Ctrl+C. However the damage was done, rendering the system both unusable and unbootable. Fortunately I managed to recover some data, as the drive was not encrypted.

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    • toynbee@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I didn’t personally do this one, but I once worked at a job where I was tasked with updating a kickstart file from RHEL6 to 7. I don’t remember the details, but in the postscript, there was a variable that was set in 6 but not 7. That variable was then used in a command like rm -rf /${variable}.

      It took me a little while to figure out why every system imaged with that kickstart was emptying its own filesystem.

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    • 0xKesh@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      What distro was this out of curiosity? As far as I’m aware preserve-root enforcement comes from upstream coreutils

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      • Havatra@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Iirc, it was Debian 10 (Buster). I thought they enforced it (rm did support it at the time), but perhaps it was tricked by using an empty variable or something?

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• Successful_Try543@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  No, it does nothing.

  $ mkdir test
  $ cd test
  ~/test$ touch 1 2 3 4 5
  ~/test$ rm -rf
  ~/test$ ls
  1  2  3  4  5
  

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  • remon@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    $ mkdir test
    $ cd test
    ~/test$ touch 1 2 3 4 5
    $ cd ..
    $ rm -rf test
    $ ls
    

    No more test folder.

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    • Successful_Try543@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Exactly, but that wasn’t the question.

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      • remon@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        What are you talking about? The does exactly what I said it does.

        It only does nothing for you because you used it incorrectly (in the wrong folder without the required argument),

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