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It's been hundreds of thousands of years since some caveman realized that speed and attention to detail are inversely proportional to each other.
Why are people still taking shortcuts that carry an small, acceptable degree of risk, then blaming the system for allowing them to make the inevitable human error?
@deadbeef
please stop man you sound ever more retarded with your every new post
so you are basically saying that when and only if, i do rm rf /, i get a warning and a confirmation will slow down the system?
jesus... you and deadbeef sound like little children
You'll have to beg - or install Windows, whatever comes first.
Happy to be of service.
@Vald
Why are you specifically demanding that the system not prompt you for things and then getting upset that it doesn't prompt you? Wasn't hard to figure out what it did...
http://linux.die.net/man/1/rm
Because you're a troll, that's why. I give you 8/10, good troll actually.
i was pm'd by someone and i now know why rm -rf / exists
if you are doing something illegal and you get raided, its very fast to type it before they kick the door down.
That wouldn't be effective. The disk needs written to several times over. rm -rf just removes inodes from the 'index of files on the disk that the OS uses to reference the physical location of the data'... the data is still physically there, so anyone with experience of data recovery would have something to salvage.
The reason people think the story is a trolling session is because he does something with a tool called
ddthat would remove any salvageable data physically from disk, seemingly on purpose.That is the only use I can see for rm -rf / wiping the entire drive, although slower, it would probably be better to write 1s and 0s to the drive..
One of the most user-friendly OS on the planet allows you do do rm -rf: Mac OSX. Sure, your usual desktop user drags to a trash can, etc. but normal unix is there underneath with all its destructive potential.
@Vald:
If you're the same person as the guy in the news article, how about confirming it by sending a tweet on your twitter? I somehow doubt you're the same guy. But who knows, I could be wrong...
This.
@Vald to nuke your OS you need to do this:
Su(do) to root, which requires entering the root password, or having configured (as root) such that you enter your own password.
Setting the recursive flag (-r)
Setting the "don't confirm" flag (-f)
Pointing the command at the root filesystem
So you've bypassed four safeguards and complain there isn't a fifth?
5 - If your name is Vald, these aren't the droids you're looking for.
@raindog308 thats not the point, its the fact that people are defending it for no reason
accidents do happen, and the command above can only do harm to the system, so i was just trying to mock some sense out of it.
@k0nsl dont be funny, actually.. you can
Who stores backups on the same disk anyway... Dumb ass!
Well I can tell you that I had the same mistake. but I was trying to do a rm -rf ./*
Just because I got distracted I didn't type the damn dot "."
So it was a bad rm -rf /*
Is not because someone wants to do it, bad thigns happens
Oh, I must have misunderstood you earlier in your reply to me; it seemed as if you were this chicken masala guy mentioned in the news article.
Sorry for the confusion.
It's a bit more complicated than that. I have no workflow that involves running rm -rf /. However, I understand that Linux is a very powerful operating system that is used for so many things beyond my comprehension, things far beyond my set of skills or hobbies. Instead, I admit that I do not know everything and as a result I desire to see base OS functionality remain in place, knowing that others are doing many many things that I could not understand.
I certainly would not advocate removing confirmation override flags from base OS functions simply because of one misuse case, while not understanding the millions (or more) legitimate use cases for the OS.
Just because I don't have a legitimate use case for it, that doesn't even come close to implying that no one else does. However, I'm not that far from a use case that involves using a flag to halt confirmations. A bash script that makes new backups and removes old ones on a cron would instantly be a use case for me, it just so happens that right now I'm not using any custom bash script backup cron jobs that work in such a way.
Keep in mind that, again, "rm -rf /" is not a single entity. You're not going to type "r" and hit tab to autocomplete to that. You're using two sub functions of a function and then defining a path.
@k0nsl no worries
It was a backup script
My point stands...why mount all backup options at the same time.
Crappy script.
How about deleting UEFI with rm?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/02/delete_efivars_linux/
oh sure. i was just pointing out how the backup drives came to be erased too. he made a series of mistakes that led to this.
Humans make mistakes. This is a thing that will never change. Tired people make stupid mistakes.
Imagine in a datacenter you unplug the wrong rack. It happened to us. As a result 1h+ downtime and some VMs left to repair. Simple mistake.
Personally I check 3 times, but if i were to be doing this for a living 8 hours a day, i would probably be less careful, if the boss says turn off rack 8-A I would, without checking if it does not house our core routers by some chance and boss made a typo. Who is to be blamed? The boss who made the typo or me which I mounted the routers myself, maybe? One moment of absentmindedness, it happened.
Surgeons leaving various things in patients or operating on the wrong limb/side are in every hospital, nuclear plant operators open personal email on the servers controlling critical processes, demolition crews demolish the wrong house, people throw in the garbage bin family jewels. In over 40 years i made many stupid mistakes, if you never did any, well, your OCD should be rechecked, it is over 9000.
I'll never forget the time I did an rsync from a temporary directory into / with the --delete flag. Yep... no one to blame but me there
You haven't heard about systemd efivars have you?
Ok so not only did he run a backup script where the variables didn't work and it ran rm -rf / he actually ran it using ansible on multiple boxes.
Surely you'd test the script BEFORE running it on everything no?
You need to LISTEN little boy.
if you run
rm /you get a popup asking for a Y N D.if you run
rm -rf /you don't get a pop up because you are using "flags"-r => Includes folders / files
-f => FORCE (this is what is known as force overwrite) meaning it won't ask you for a "are you sure?" Yes/No/Disable
For safety reasons when I use that command I do:
rm -rf ./that means ONLY this folder.Of course you would, but that ruins the story.