this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
871 points (98.4% liked)

linuxmemes

20880 readers
5 users here now

I use Arch btw


Sister communities:

Community rules

  1. Follow the site-wide rules and code of conduct
  2. Be civil
  3. Post Linux-related content
  4. No recent reposts

Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 182 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

--no-preserve-root is a security option to keep you from accidentally removing all your files. Make sure you always use it along side the -f option and -r which stands for rescue - meaning rm will create a rescue copy of the deleted data.

[–] [email protected] 85 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see you also know Lionel Hutz

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Is he related to Miguel Sanchez?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the / means 'working directory only', a security feature to prevent accidently using absolute paths.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Use sudo before rm to improve efficiency.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sudo is short for “super do”, which means “do this at super speed”

[–] ICastFist 4 points 1 year ago

Too bad they never added the lu to make it sudolu , to execute at ludicrous speed

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

OML, this is excellent.
Please, is there a !shitty_linux_advice community?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Some poor soul is going to take this to the bank and have a horrible day. You could have at least told them to use the -p flag to protect any critical system files from being removed.