There was a problem with a server we were staging on, and I was providing DevOps help remote.

As a joke I said, "haha if you run `sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root` everything will be fixed!"

They ran it. RIP server-kun 2016-2018 💨

I curb procrastination by throwing in a random "sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" to my test cases to see if I have unsafe evals. It's like Russian Roulette every test.

I think I just completely ruined the day of a guy I know.

I thought I was funny and told him to "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /"

I thought people know this. Fml. I am so sorry

I taught my 9yo sister to SSH from my Arch Linux system to an Ubuntu system, she was amazed to see terminal and Firefox launching remotely. Next I taught her to murder and eat all the memory (I love Linux, as Batman, one should also know the weaknesses). Now she can rm rf / --no-preserve-root and the forkbomb. She's amazed at the power of one liners. Will be teaching her python as she grew fond of my Raspberry Pi zero w with blinkt and phat DAC, making rainbows and playing songs via mpg123.
I made her use play with Makey Makey when it first came out but it isn't as interesting. Drop your suggestions which could be good for her learning phase?

*Deletes system32*
Omg why it's not working anymore? Holy shit windows suck. I didn't even do anything and it stopped working. Fucking useless OS.
sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Oh it's understandable it's not working anymore, I fucked it up myself.

2 weeks ago I was writing an `rm -rf --no-preserve-root /` oneliner as a joke - as an answer to a question "I have access to my competitor's server; what should I do?". I was crafting it so that it'd do as much damage to the business (not the server) as it could.

And I accidentally executed it on my work laptop. In the background (with an `&`).

It ran for a good 5-7 seconds on an i7-11850H with an SSD, until I issued a `kill %%`

Good thing it ran as a non-root user. Bad thing - I have no idea what it may have deleted nor whether it touched my /home.

I'm afraid to restart my laptop now :)

whoopsie :)

One of our newly-joined junior sysadmin left a pre-production server SSH session open. Being the responsible senior (pun intended) to teach them the value of security of production (or near production, for that matter) systems, I typed in sudo rm --recursive --no-preserve-root --force / on the terminal session (I didn't hit the Enter / Return key) and left it there. The person took longer to return and the screen went to sleep. I went back to my desk and took a backup image of the machine just in case the unexpected happened.

On returning from wherever they had gone, the person hits enter / return to wake the system (they didn't even have a password-on-wake policy set up on the machine). The SSH session was stil there, the machine accepted the command and started working. This person didn't even look at the session and just navigated away elsewhere (probably to get back to work on the script they were working on).

Five minutes passes by, I get the first monitoring alert saying the server is not responding. I hoped that this person would be responsible enough to check the monitoring alerts since they had a SSH session on the machine.
Seven minutes : other dependent services on the machine start complaining that the instance is unreachable.

I assign the monitoring alert to the person of the day. They come running to me saying that they can't reach the instance but the instance is listed on the inventory list. I ask them to show me the specific terminal that ran the rm -rf command. They get the beautiful realization of the day. They freak the hell out to the point that they ask me, "Am I fired?". I reply, "You should probably ask your manager".

Lesson learnt the hard-way. I gave them a good understanding on what happened and explained the implications on what would have happened had this exact same scenario happened outside the office giving access to an outsider. I explained about why people in _our_ domain should care about security above all else.

There was a good 30+ minute downtime of the instance before I admitted that I had a backup and restored it (after the whole lecture). It wasn't critical since the environment was not user-facing and didn't have any critical data.

Since then we've been at this together - warning engineers when they leave their machines open and taking security lecture / sessions / workshops for new recruits (anyone who joins engineering).

Ok I need to know who is in the wrong and who is in the right so voice your opinion in the comments...

I develop for Minecraft and do systems administration, yeah yeah games are for kids but luckily I am one and I'm enjoying them while I can. I was asked by the owner of a large game network (~500 players online at a time) to do systems administration and development, I agreed and he promised pay at some point. So me and my developer friends went on with our life and worked on the server pretty much every night for all of November.

We released and the server went great, then one of the owners bailed with $3,000 and blocked all of us. No problem we will just fix the donations to go to our buisness PayPal. We changed it and the owner made ~$2,000. Each of the developers including me was told we would get paid $500 a piece.

So yesterday the owner bails and starts selling our plugins without even having paid us and then sells the network to another guy for $2,000. (That's well enough to pay us) did he pay us? nope. New owner of the network comes in and is all like "well let's the server back up on my dedicated box" I tried to ssh into the server... Nothing the port is closed. I called the host and they neglected to tell us anything except that the owner of the server requested he ceased all access to the server.

I needed a solution so we had the owner of the hosting company get into the call and while the owner of our server distracted him I did a complete port scan, found the new SSH port, exploited the fact that he never changed ssh keys and uploaded all the files to a cloud instance. Then I ran this on the server... "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" now our server is happily up and under proper ownership and we all got paid...

Was breaking into the server the right thing to do though?

How do you even type --no-preserve-root accidentally?! :-o

sudo rm -rfv --no-preserve-root /

I'm learning docker and I just started a container running a Linux distro.
What was the first command I run in the container?
rm -Rf / --no-preserve-root

alias hecking='sudo'
alias Kill='rm -rf --no-preserve-root'
alias Me='/'

I just tested a VPS and it was kind of impressive: I just had shared hosting until now and it is a total difference when you're having full root access.
Kind of hating these greedy shared hosting fuckers now ;)
Because it was just for testing purposes, I wanted to try the mysterious command "rm -rf / --no-preserve-root".
It was working for around 5 minutes and after that literally no command worked anymore!
Not even reboot worked :P
Then I tried reboot it via the VPS panel :) End of the story: vps panel chrashed with error message: unable to start vps :P
I thought it was kind of funnny and nice to share & thanks for reading 'til here!

Somebody already thought about it
root@6e7d83927271:/# [ $[ $RANDOM % 3 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo *Click*
rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'
rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe
*Click*

today i found new way to shut down my system...
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sudo rm --no-preserve-root -rf /