• Tetsuo@jlai.lu
      18·
      1 year ago

      Remember that AI answer that said that adding -f option was to get a confirmation before deletion ?

      I’m a bit concerned that this kind of meme will get a lot more real when people will blindly trust AI for commands.

      Unfortunately I couldn’t find the post in question but if I recall it was GitHub AI telling boldly that you can add -f to your RM command to get a confirmation…

      Read the man people. RTFM is still a good advice.

      • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
        12·
        1 year ago

        I mean.
        People have been saying “press alt F4 to change your IRC nick” or whatever for several decades

        • tuhriel@discuss.tchncs.de
          9·
          1 year ago

          And didn’t make an IOS upgrade back in the days the iPhone waterproof? And another one enabled fast charging in the microwave oven…

          • miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml
            4·
            1 year ago

            The fact that manufacturers feel the need to put warnings that encompass this kind of stupidity on their product tells you all you need to know, doesn’t it.

            Wasn’t there a woman who tried to dry her little dog in the microwave, sued the company and won, because they never explicitely stated not to put live animals in there?

            I hope that story isn’t true, but most warning labels exist for a reason, and that reason isn’t common sense.

        • tslnox@reddthat.com
          4·
          1 year ago

          Or, a bit more recent, telling someone in WoW that command to do something was /camp (it logs you out)

  • handsatinizer@lemm.ee
    551·
    1 year ago

    don’t forget no-preserve-root to remove all the roots and prevent it from getting reinstalled

    • Tuxman@kbin.social
      51·
      1 year ago

      A little more destructive 😅
      “As a ‘super user’, do ‘remove’ with ‘force’ and ‘recursively’ everything starting from the beginning of the hard drive (‘/‘)

      Though I think most consumer Linux OS has like 2-3 warnings before actually doing it……… doesn’t stop everybody 😅

    • Wulff@sh.itjust.works
      42·
      1 year ago

      In Linux, the root of the filesystem is /

      The command would remove recursively every file/directory in the filesystem, essentially nuking the whole system.

      • Kühe sind toll@feddit.de
        151·
        1 year ago

        Im not sure if it would delete the whole system. Isn’t it more likely that it will destroy everything until it kills a file/directory necessary for the operation to run?

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
          341·
          1 year ago

          Its running in ram so no, it would destroy everything.

          What’s worse is if you have any storage mounted. I’ve known people who wiped there backups

          • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
            4·
            1 year ago

            Thats rough. Good to know. Also one reason why I ever only connect to storage when I need it and dismount when I don’t and don’t save the credentials (and have another backup off site).

        • Cypher@aussie.zone
          32·
          1 year ago

          The reason you expect this is because Windows has a file lock behaviour that won’t let you delete a file when it’s in use, in Linux this limitation doesn’t exist.

          Raymond Chan, arguably one of the best software engineers in the world, and a Microsoft employee, has repeatedly lamented the near malware like work arounds developers have had to invent to overcome this limitation with uninstallers.

          Think about uninstalling a game. You need to run “uninstall.exe” but you don’t want uninstall.exe to exist after you’ve run it… but you can’t delete a file that’s in use. Uninstall.exe will always be in use when you run it….so how do you make it remove itself?

          Schedule a task? Side load a process? Inject a process? Many ways…. But most look like malware.

          Linux has never suffered this flaw.

          • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
            6·
            1 year ago

            This seems like a pretty specific use case, but also pretty common. A system function to delete the file that called it should cover that entirely, but I guess psudo-malware is acceptable?

            • Cypher@aussie.zone
              61·
              1 year ago

              Pseudo-malware is pretty much the way to go as a developer in my experience.

              I believe his suggestion of a javascript file that deletes itself works only works because javascript gets sandboxed and doesn’t suffer from Windows “flaw” with file locks.

              https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230911-00/?p=108749

              While Raymond does offer a solution he’s also completely side stepping any responsibility on Microsoft’s part in creating and perpetuating this problem without offering their own native solution.

              • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
                3·
                1 year ago

                That last bit IMO is one reason to argue against him being the best software engineer. He might have the skills, but they are offset by his conflict of interest with MS.

          • Octopus@thelemmy.club
            1·
            1 year ago

            I made a Batch uninstaller (to one of my other bat scripts I think), and it could remove itself without any problem just with the command “del whateverthenamewas.bat”

            • tslnox@reddthat.com
              4·
              1 year ago

              Yeah, because the bat file isn’t actually running, it’s just a list of commands cmd should execute.

              • Natanael@slrpnk.net
                3·
                1 year ago

                Yup, CMD acts as a parser / runtime and the process is bound to the CMD binary, the script file is being run by CMD which keeps a copy of it in its own working memory in RAM

        • Knusper@feddit.de
          24·
          1 year ago

          Before throwing away an old laptop, I had it do that to itself. Well, more specifically I used shred, which doesn’t just mark files as ‘deleted’, but also actively overwrites the bytes on disk.

          I started it from a TTY, so that there was no GUI that could want to load files from disk and then potentially crash the whole operation. But yeah, it just went through like normal and I ended up back on my shell (which makes sense, the shell should be in RAM).
          It was only when I ran exit to close that shell, that the system showed it was irreparably broken.

          I did then also take out the hard drive to whack it with a hammer, just to be sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

        • JPAKx4@lemmy.sdf.org
          20·
          1 year ago

          A lot of Linux distros load most system required processes into memory, which is why you can update while using the system. This would also allow you to (probably) delete everything.

        • Wulff@sh.itjust.works
          4·
          1 year ago

          Well, maybe. My explanation was an oversimplification.

          You can always try it and see for yourself (in a VM of course).

        • Natanael@slrpnk.net
          1·
          1 year ago

          It would delete all files, but if you happen to be running a distro configured to run from a RAM disk after boot then it won’t actually immediately halt (see almost every single liveCD Linux environment)

  • Presi300@lemmy.worldEnglish
    252·
    1 year ago

    Also, remember to empty your recycle bin by doing sudo rf -rm /usr/bin, and don’t forget the super recycle bin for hidden super garbage sudo rm -rf /usr/sbin

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    318·
    1 year ago

    Yeah and an old joke that doesn’t even work anymore since… decades, now? For those kind of folders, extra flags are required

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.eeEnglish
    221·
    1 year ago

    I’ve never actually tried this but feel like rm should have a built in warning specifically for that command letting them know they’ve been trolled and have a y/N prompt.

        • russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.netEnglish
          61·
          1 year ago

          I think that is only if you pass /, I don’t think the flag is required for /* which is what is shown here - if I remember right, it’s because the * triggers the shell to expand the paths and that flag is only built to protect / (from say, having an empty variable alongside /).

          • blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.ukEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            Yes, the * is expanded by the shell so the rm command just sees lots of individual files being passed in

    • thomas@lemmy.ca
      4·
      1 year ago

      Come on, it is super fun. Just install VirtualBox and set up a virtual machine, make sure there is no funky mount point that touches your host machine, and go nuke that VM !