this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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linuxmemes

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I use Arch btw


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[–] [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