Comments

• CallMeAl@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Surely you can tell us, Codewizard!

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• AstroLightz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  You have it backwards.

  rm -fr /* removes the French language pack that comes preinstalled on your system.

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• remon@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It will delete everything in the directory after that, without asking for further confirmation.

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  • 0xKesh@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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 ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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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  • Successful_Try543@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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 ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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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• neidu3@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Short answer: Nothing

  Long answer: It is part of a command that deletes everything. The only thing missing is the argument specifying what to delete. Examples:

  rm -rf *
  rm rf /some/directory
  

  It’s somewhat (in)famous because it’ll do so without asking for confirmation. The only exception is rm -rf / on a modern distro which will complain that you’re attempting to delete EVERYTHING on the system. In the olden days it’d just do it, but these days it tells you to add –no-preserve-root as well if you really wish to do so.

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• Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  rm -rf

  For even more fun, add a single / at the end.

  /s

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  • waldfee@feddit.org ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    You can have even more fun with ~

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• Strider@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Creating a quick test vm isn’t that hard, go nuts.

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