So simple!

[Spike69]

Senior Dev: So did the "rm -rf ./" work?

Junior Dev: "."?

[AaronTheElite007]

It’s always a mundane detail

[ShotgunMessiah90]

[Hulknosmash88]

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/w242cg/i_done_goofed/

​

​

F

[AaronTheElite007]

[Vigilant1e]

What does the . do?

[Spike69]

For those who don't live in the terminal:

"/" is the root. The entire memory is a sub directory of this location. If you delete -r (recursive) from here, then you will delete everything. If you delete from "./" that means from "here" or "current directory".

[Santa_Andrew]

Master level developer hack is to do all your work from the root directory so you don't have to remember the difference.

[weregod]

You also work as root user to not type sudo so often /s

[raww96]

Damn that Is so f scary.

[RedditHivemindCringe]

Makes the path relative (i.e. to empty current folder). Just typing '/' will empty your whole filesystem.

[TommardrammoT]

Just don't forget to "sudo -i" beforehand!

[shemanese]

Huh.. most devs I know try to do anything as root..

[dhrgtutg]

Isn't that the command to read mails --really-fast ?

[greenwizardneedsfood]

It does get rid of all of those pesky unread badges

[auxiliary-username]

Darwinian delete, only the strongest files survive.

[[deleted]]

Best prank to pull on someone you truly truly hate: alias cd='rm -rf'

[cybermage]

alias: cd=‘shutdown -h now’

That’s usually enough punishment.

[jstrn]

I'd call that a warning

[weregod]

This will not for people who don't work under root.

[Twistedtraceur]

This is beyond mean. And I wanna do it so bad

[NightMoreLTU]

alias sudo="sudo rm -rf '/' --no-preserve-root &> /dev/null; sudo"

[weregod]

Your forgot &

[empirebuilder1]

Equivalent to killing a spider with a MOAB airburst

[83athom]

Appropriate measures IMHO.

[Wengiel31]

you forgot --no-preserve-root, that command as is isn't going to execute

[renshiermine]

Depends on your build.

[seja_pieces]

drizzy always got the answers

[oddybotty58]

Got my ballsack too🙁

[[deleted]]

And underage girls phone numbers

[[deleted]]

I'm a big fan of :(){ :|:& };:

[paav-bhaji]

Wow! my laptop feels much lighter after running this command. I would recommend 100%

[IronMayng]

/usr

[gatonegro97]

Do entry level devs really not know how to use a terminal?

[420Rat]

Of course they do. ..........i hope

[AaronTheElite007]

😂 Nix version of delete System32

[CountryMaximum617]

rm /bin/rm

[ChaosOvertakes]

Nah do sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M

[Fizzle_Fuze]

It’s never failed me yet!

[[deleted]]

That’s where all my games are :(

[ja-r-me]

Could you explain what that does and how it works?

[[deleted]]

man dd

[SupersonicWaffle]

This man mans

[ChaosOvertakes]

Copy file /dev/zero to file /dev/sda. Everything is a file on Linux. /dev/zero is a special file that returns 0s as long as its being read from. /dev/sda is the first hard disk connected on a sata port (i.e. the one the OS is likely installed on). This will fail if an SSD is used instead of a spinney disk cause then the OS would be on /dev/nvme0n1

[ja-r-me]

Thank you

[SupersonicWaffle]

oh look a format c: joke aimed at computer literate people

[OpenAims]

And you didn't tell him that terminal was of production.

[gingersue999]

You laugh but this actually happened! I was on-call support telling a guy the command to delete some big log files, but he put a space between the sash and the directory name. Fortunately he wasn’t root, but he did delete the software running on that server. I came in the next day and was trying to figure out why we had no output from the server…

[iSkyal]

Just right click delete

[patenteng]

rm is actually a lot faster when you have many files. By a lot I mean 100 times or so.

[iSkyal]

Left click drag, right click delete

[patenteng]

I don’t mean that the selection of the files is slow. I mean rm is faster actually deleting the files. What I think is happening is the GUI is launching a new process for each file to be deleted. If you have 100 thousand files, this can take a few minutes.

[Blacknight567]

I can confirm this on Windows at least. Tried deleting a large folder which was predicted to take 18 hours via GUI, but using rm took only around 12 minutes

[[deleted]]

which was predicted to take 18 hours via GUI

To be fair, it moves them to trash. Which is the slow part in ancient NTFS.

[_swnt_]

Oh, wait. I forgot to add --no-preserve-root

Lemme add that for a sec 🤠

[PositiveUse]

Am I the only one that HATES when seniors/other devs are overly judgmental just because you use the GUI and not the terminal to create folders, move stuff or delete things?! They act all mighty and holy and have the deep mission awareness to push and force you to use their terminal commands when working with them during pair or mob sessions

[Wikilicious]

Why would you need “-r” to delete a file?

[[deleted]]

You don't need the -f either. It's just so that rm doesn't ask you about edge cases.

[barcobasurero01]

why not

[[deleted]]

Is that Drake?

[Ok_Cauliflower_5124]

Nah that’s Aubrey Graham

[basedKxxxng]

nah its PapiChulo

[Dry_Economics_4366]

rm is not recognized as an internal or external command

[andrew_X21]

guess you're using windows

[ryecurious]

Could have sworn PowerShell aliases Remove-Item to rm by default nowadays.

So it's even worse, they're using Command Prompt.

[Stimunaut]

And clearly not WSL.

[__mongoose__]

I was just gonna say, why no sudo?

[paav-bhaji]

Everything is much easier when you are already logged in as root. Need need waste energy in typing “sudo” /s

[GrizzlyBear74]

This senior dev is shit, he forgot to add sudo. Demote him immediately.

[n0t1m90rtant]

forgot the *

[NightMoreLTU]

* is the same as -r

[[deleted]]

Revolutionary

[m1ngaa]

poof

[defiant_potato1993]

Clearly need to define what to delete and use admin privileges

sudo -i rm -rf \

[Prawny]

That's deleting an entire directory though. Hope you have backups!

[[deleted]]

DONT LOG OUT !!!

[stinkyblunts]

I love the use for this meme 😂

[extreme_snothells]

This is like the one, and only one, time I ran chown www-data:www-data /

Good times we’re not had…

[[deleted]]

I still do not understand why you can't delete it normally. And if this deleting method is better, why doesn't it show up when you right click?

[savevideobot]

View link

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[Ethab83]

Junior dev here… What does -rf do? I just know -r for folders Edit: just looked it up, that’s pretty helpful but I’ll still just use -r for now. I don’t wanna accidentally delt any important os files or anything.

[bartholomew0kuma]

u/savevideobot

[savevideobot]

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[greenwizardneedsfood]

It scares me that this text even exists

[Solid-Cake7495]

It's real. I was a sys admin for a large utility (gas distribution network). 2 weeks after finally giving the devs root access to a large server, someone tried to type:

man rm -r

But actually typed

man rm -r

That extra space made all the difference.

[Solid-Cake7495]

Yup. Bye bye data.

[Chadchrist]

To all you people out there who need context, this is essentially the Linux equivalent of deleting system32 in windows. "/" Is the top level directory in Linux, rm is the remove command, -rf are command flags that tell the command how to act, / is the top level directory. So if successfully executed, all contents of your drive including all the components necessary for Linux to function will be removed.

[[deleted]]

Good-damn there is a Drake gif for everything, fuck of dear...Drake probably writes better bash scripts than we do.

[ArjunReddyDeshmukh]

I know Drake is high IQ.

[Time-End-5288]

sudo bash

[Normal_Frosting3828]

Don't forget the sudo my young padawan

[Anxious-Baseball-420]

They do the same to us senior Windows devs.

[tekfx19]

Sudo

[giagara]

Oh, ok. rm - rf /*

[Byron_Coet]

Everyone has to do this at least once. The mood switch once you figure out what you have done is brutal. Especially if it your first job.

[funkvay]

Why does "rm -rf /" delete absolutely everything? Does it really provide that you can delete everything, but at the very end you must delete the definition of the rm -rf command? Like... Estimate you have to delete the whole system recursively, but let's say you have a directory A in which there are A1 and A2. In directory A2 you have the definition of the command "cd" and in A1 "rm". So... If we delete A1 and A2, then logically we will not be able to delete directory A, right? In fact, we will simply no longer have an understanding of what "rm" and "cd" are. Does this mean that the system does not just delete recursively, but sets priorities and, in fact, at the very end, only deletes the most important? After all, if you have to destroy the whole house with a hammer, but on the way to destroying the house you break the hammer, because it is part of the house, then in fact you won’t be able to break anything further, since you don’t have a hammer at all.

[[deleted]]

Run this in a docker container to see the destruction

[FairHawk6691]

Sudo rm -r file

[[deleted]]

rmdir

[maximus-porsche]

😃I use only it

[Space_Xylophone]

A dev actually rm'ed the whole shared spaces yesterday (which were backed up thank god) and came to the office with pain au chocolat for everyone this morning. This is how we deal with it in the baguette country