From: Alexander Schreiber (als_at_thangorodrim.de)
Date: Wed Apr 16 2003 - 11:22:39 PDT
On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 03:11:20AM -0500, John Acuff wrote:
>
> On Tuesday, April 15, 2003, at 04:32 PM, Matthew Robinson wrote:
>
> > the whole world is waiting for you to type
> >
> > rm -rf /
> >
> > and bury your head in your hands...
> >
> > M :-)
> >
>
> I gather this is a "Bad Thing"? For the benefit of us non-Unix heads,
> what exactly does this do? My guess is that it does something really
> nasty to your hard drive.........
Totally wipe out your machine.
rm is the delete command, the commandline switches "-rf" tell it to
operate recursively and to force all operations (== "Do what I told you
and ask no questions") and / is the root of the UNIX filesystem.
Therefore, "rm -rf /" deletes _all_ files and all _all_ directories on
_all_ mounted filesystems. And since UNIX works along a "you get what
you type" approach, undelete is usually not an option. If you have a
working backup, it would be a nice time to fetch it then, if not you
learned a hard lesson why you need a current and working backup ;-)
Regards,
Alex.
-- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison -- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries List FAQ/Etiquette/Terms: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
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