Don’t run this command unless you want to delete all the files on your system and break Linux on your system.
is linux that dependant on French? wow
Oui
Did you know? Linus Torvolds is actually the consort child of two french people! That’s why you have to use the french flag when removing folders, it’s an ode to his upbringing
Stallman is fuming rn
Careful, you have to also add
--no-preserve-root
to make sure you get all of it out. If you leave the roots, it’ll just grow back later!(But seriously, don’t actually do this unless you’re prepared to lose data and potentially even brick your computer. Don’t even try it on a VM or a computer you’re planning to wipe anyway, because if something is mounted that you don’t expect, you’ll wipe that too. On older Linux kernels, EFI variables were mounted as writable, so running
rm -rf /
could actually brick your computer. This shouldn’t still be the case, but I wouldn’t test it, myself.)Fun fact, rm -rf /* does not need --no-preserve-root. It will happily start as technically, according to the preserve root check, /* is not root as the target is not /
It’s slightly different. Your shell will see the
/*
and replace it with all the directories under /, e.g./bin /dev /etc /home
etc. So the actual command that runs isrm -rf /bin /dev /etc /home
etc.
Careful, you have to also add --no-preserve-root to make sure you get all of it out. If you leave the roots, it’ll just grow back later!
Oh my god I effin guffawed, thanks for that
I ran it in Hyper-V once to see what happens and it deletes all the boot entries from the VM firmware (including pxe boot and the dvd drive)
I get these are jokes but I really don’t find anything funny about it, it becomes a meme and then people start getting more creative and pushing it more and being more covert and people come up with other little japes then new Linux users get their shit destroyed and maybe important info gets lost or precious memories so they say Linux is a piece of shit and go back to windows.
It’s not even funny to start with so when it inevitably inspires people to be assholes and bullies that’s all we’ve achieved.
I totally agree. We should be more open and welcoming to new users. Imagine some new people on the steam deck being curious and diving into Linux and running into this. Undoubtedly, we’d lose at least a few users that brick their machines.
I get that this humor fits and entertains the technically inclined of us, but if we truly want more widespread use of Linux, shouldn’t we open our arms to less technical users as well? Besides, even for the more technical of us, this joke is so old and run down 🙃
Eh, this is a classic joke by now. There’s those jokes on the Windows side too (like the ‘delete system32’ one).
It’s the new “delete system32 to get better performance”
Lol rm -rf as a joke isn’t new anyway
except you probably delete more than system files which could be easily restored from an install disk
- Don’t run any command you don’t understand