rm -rf /

So has anyone every ran 'rm -rf /' for the hell of it, or on accident?

I've never done that. Why don't you try it & let us know the results.

haha, Im think I might just do that

From what I gather via rm --help, you'ld have to pass it a --no-preserve-root flag for it to do anything.

It also says using rm instead of shred will leave "the file" recoverable, but it doesn't say anything about "filesystems" being recoverable.

-f Attempt to remove the files without prompting for confirmation, regardless of the file's permissions. If the file does not exist, do not display a diagnostic message or modify the exit status to reflect an error. The -f option overrides any previous -i options.

That's all the FreeBSD man page says.

Here's the two options of interest from Ubuntus man page for rm.

There were a couple of videos on YouTube a while back that depict screencasts of people running rm -rf / on a fresh Linux install. The results are pretty funny; it doesn't completely wipe out the system since many root-level files are protected and cannot be deleted, but it does end up wiping out all language files and many important configuration files. The UI environment takes a big hit.

should also be noted that simply running "rm -rf /" will do nothing more than as it lacks the proper privileges ;]

So the moral of the story is: don't give idiots root access.

You read my mind!

What about this? it wont try to remove the directory root, just everything inside of it.


I think I might throw up a instance on my mosso account to check this out here soon.