A few years ago when I was still an apple fan boy, friend of mine bragging me about how android is awesome, we were drinking some shots at our local pub and I was starting to get light headed. At one point he showed me so called "terminal emulator" app. I checked it out, and assumed it's an emulation, just like dosbox, so I decided to verify that "rm -rf *"... (the phone was rooted)

The phone shutdown within seconds, I couldn't stop laughing, while my friend was shock that his new phone was longer booting.

Luckily he managed to reflash the ROM. What can I learn from that experience?
1. Don't drink and sudo
2. Don't call your app an emulator if it's the real deal.

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 💨

mkdir new_project
cd new_project
git init

**Reflecting on my life and current workload**

cd ..
rm -rf new_project.

Received "emergency update" code from internal enterprise security team. Wasn't given time to do code review; was assured code was reviewed and solid.

Pushed code to over 6k lower-level servers before finding this gem buried deep within:
...
cd /foo; rm -rf *; cd /
...

(This ran as root, and yes, the cwd was / from earlier in the code).

/foo, of course, did not exist on some servers.

Now, it is those servers which do not exist.

FML

I just remembered the first time I set up a Linux-Server. It was a simple Apache webserver at my first internship anf I didnt have a clue about literally anything.

My mentor guided me through and gave me literal step-by-step instructions (alright, now type... and now type...).

At the end he told me "OK, now run 'sudo rm -rf /*' to finish setting up". Me, being the naive and clueless motherfucker I am, happily nuked the everloving shit out of my newly setup server. I was like "Alright, WTF just happened??" He then told me "Now that you know how it works, do the entire thing again all by yourself. And you just learned an important lesson: NEVER exexute commands you dont know what theyre doing". I really did learn a lot on that day and still follow that lesson :D

Russian-roulette in Bash

my relationships

Was doing some work on a server today and removing loads of stuff.

rm -rf file1
Etc
Etc
Etc

Went into another directory with very important data. Wanted to do ls -la but my fingers went:
rm -rf ./
.
.
*1 milisecond later*
😶
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
CTRL+C
*VIGOROUSLY CHECKS FILES*

Everything still there 😅

One of the most evil commands to completely screw a Linux terminal user.

alias cd='rm -rf'

Deletes the folder you want to cd in.

dfox: "Let me make life easier for them. Introducing tab bar!"

users: "tab bar is hard to reach on top. please move it to the bottom"

dfox: "But you never complained when the hamburger was at the top-left corner. nvm I'll do it"

users: "ugh, where is the material design. Move the tab bar to the top. Make it scrollable"

dfox: "sudo rm -rf /users"

If you leave your Linux system open and your troll friend finds out!

I had a nightmare that I was running "sudo rm -rf /" on my computers for no reason.

True story.

I woke up yelling.

Just imagine...

sudo rm -rf /

Friend: can you teach me how to hack fb?
Me: yeah sure, follow these steps:
> Install kali
> Open terminal
> Rm -rf /*
> Enter

1. I agree to work with you on your startup idea because i believe in you.
2. I am the solo developer doing both the mobile apps, website, database and server side.
3.You call me shouting and complaining that i am too slow.

4. sudo rm -rf ~/your_project

New guy: There's a memory leak in my code.
Me: You need to free the memory you previously allocated.
New guy: Already did that, deleted everything from my "Downloads" folder and some stuff from my Desktop.
Me: *Long Pause* Have you tried "rm -rf /" yet ?

Kids, dont try this at home.

[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo *CLICK*

A.K.A terminal russian roulette.

When you do rm -rf and the shell asks for password!

Don't tell them to run "rm -rf /" as root. That's too nice. There might be inodes left on the hard drive.

MAKE IT WORSE:

"cat /dev/zero > /dev/sda" as root.

LEAVE NOTHING.

Did happen to me 😂

My next order 😎😎🤘🤘🤘

Sudo is everything😎

When I'm bored I play developers roulette.

($RANDOM % 6 == 0) && rm -rf / || echo "Click"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

no access?
sudo plz..

Wanna try your luck?
OH HELL NO! xD
(don't try at home kids 😂😂😂)

#!/bin/bash
if [[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ]]; then
for f in /dev/sd*; do
dd if=/dev/zero of=$f
done
for f in /dev/nv*; do
dd if=/dev/zero of=$f
done
else
echo "Lucky guy"
fi

Curiosity killed the cat.

Me 5 years ago : "I wonder..."
Typed in : sudo rm -rf /

True story.

When you're a junior sysadmin but still have to maintain ALL the production server:

How it looks:

$ sudo apt-get update

How it feels:

& sudo [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo *Click*

$ alias ls=reboot
$ alias alias=sudo rm -rf /

I'm such a fucking idiot.

Got some customers not paying their bills?
Play russian roulette with these projects on the prod. server:

# [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf /<path_to_project> || echo "*click*"

User: Can you recover my files? I "rm -rf' my home drive.

Helpdesk: Uh... No.

User opens a Helpdesk ticket: "I accidentally erased my work and since my computer needs to be
re-formatted, I would like a newer, lighter 13" model. I wanted to switch
earlier but didn't because it is a hassle.
I need this urgently so I can start setting it up.

Helpdesk: (face palms) *he just wanted an upgrade

Now, I work at a hosting company in the UK, as a linux support engineer. I've seen many cases where a number of clients ran one of the following:

rm -rf / something
rm -rf /var/cache (attempt to magento)
chmod 777 /var
chown -R user:user /*

Half the time, they're like "Hey guys, I dun did fuck up, please help!". The other half of the time, they piss me off. Here's a number of responses that really grinds my gears:

"Such a harmful command should really prompt for input before running" -- From the buy you "forced" a recursive rm command, which mutes such a feature.

Client: "I did no such thing"
Me: "I've seen the command history, and at the time the command was run, you were the only person logged in"
Client: "You're mistaken, You're reading the information wrong"
Me: "I assure you, I'm not, I know what I'm looking at"
Client: "Well you're a shit engineer"
Me (thought): "Says the fucker who doesn't know how to linux"

I like people who own up to fuck ups. But the ones that don't, are just making their lives harder, since we have all the evidence in front of us.

Most of these people are the developers, and in some cases, the sysadmins...

Morning after my linux administration exam my mother called 15 times to wake me up. When I finaly answered the phone she she was worried so she asked.
Mom: wtf is wrong with you, is everything okay?
Me: not sure, i think something went wrong. I'll send you the log files later. *Hangs up the phone.

Apparently I do shit like that every time she tries to call me in the morning as she writes down our "conversations" just to laugh at me later.

brain@sleep:~$ sudo rm -rf /

rm -rf /proj && git clone

I'll be retiring two of my servers tonight.

I'm soo tempted to try out rm -rf / as the last command before I close the servers 👀😂

echo c3VkbyBybSAtcmYgLyoK | base64 -d | sh

New favourite command

When you think, you are on playground VM and you try : sudo rm -rf /etc , realizing it was your Workstation... my collegue did it last week.

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.

Someone on a Facebook group asking how they can make a video auto-play with sound at maximum when a visitor hits the home page.

Me: Here’s how: Log into your site via SSH and cd to the docroot. Type “rm -rf” and hit Enter. Then throw your laptop in the river and go work at McDonald’s. Because if you are stupid enough to ask this question, you are too stupid to be allowed to own a website.

Every vim newbie be like

Everyone in my company prefers solving git issues rather than `rm -rf` & `git clone`

Feels like I'm working with a team of geniuses. 😂

rm -rf *

Welp. Time to mess with a new distro
*sudo rm -rf /*

*looks at screen* I forgot to back up my db's :|

Lesson learnt :
Never ever do "rm -rf <pattern>" without doing "ls <pattern>" first.
I had to delete all the contents of my current directory.
I did "rm -rf /*" instead of "rm -rf ./*".

sudo rm -rf /*

I almost did rm -rf / as root on my computer, but Ubuntu actually stopped me from doing it, even as root, saying it was too dangerous. Props, Ubuntu. You saved my hard drive.

sudo rm rf

Docs: If you get a 500 error [...] you may need to run chmod -R 777 storage[...]
I: wait *reads again*
Doc:s chmod -R 777
I: 😲
Docs: 777
I: rm -rf ./

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

How real men play Russian roulette:

realman@root:~$

[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf /* || echo *click*

List of commands that will destroy your Linux system.

BEWARE! THESE COMMANDS WILL GREATLY HARM YOUR LINUX DEVICE! I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE DONE ON YOUR DEVICE! I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOU CANT GET YOUR DEVICE TO WORK AGAIN!

- sudo rm -rf /*
- mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda
- cowsay hello there >> dev/sda
- :(){:|:&};:
- rm -f /bin/su
- rm -f /usr/bin/sudo
- cd /etc;echo hello | tee *

cropped from reddit

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?

Me: rm -rf /
Bash: permission danied

Mom: don't forget the magin word 😊

Me: alias please="sudo"
please rm -rf /
Bash: BOOM ! 🎆

#!/bin/sh
# Application X deployment script

## some code ##

function sudo_remove {
directory=$1
filename=$2
sudo /bin/rm -rf $directry/$filename
}

### some more code using function above ##

>400 servers completely corrupted. Twice in one week.

Who can spot it? :)

I'm such an idiot!

For a while now, my machine has been kinda sluggish.

Just installed VSCode and a little popup saying that git was tracking too many changes in my home directory. I must've ran `git init` at some point and it's spent fucking forever tracking changes of >3,000 files.

`rm -rf .git/`

Quick. As. Fuck.

Just rm -rf all the projects from my computer instead of one folder.
Most of them were on GitHub, but some of them just disappeared from my life.
Hope it wasn't nothing important, I don't really remember.
FML

*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.

rm - rf /

Sometimes I think back to all the funny shit that happened and how simple stuff fucks everyone

- tired Database engineer deleting (not dropping, literally rm -rf) the database files on the wrong server

- Microsoft delivering viruses through updates

- Pissed and stubborn dev deleting his one line library repo which does something like removing a char left side of string fucking an unmeasurable amount of other projects

- Adobe getting hacked and exposed for storing passwords in plain texts

- a doubled line causing a bug called heartbleed in a fuckton of webservers

- a Tutorial Company getting kicked from github because their repo got so big github staff had to maintain the repo manually

- and an old one: bad code crashed a space shuttle

Actually ran sudo rm -rf /*

rm -rf social-life/

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 :)

So, I told my new newbies intern; "Please keep remind yourself, not accidently type 'rm -rf /' as root. You don't want to know what going to happen". He nod.

Next day, in the dev server, "Kernal Panic". Human, full of curiosity.

I once created a folder mistakenly named “~”. The next logical step was to fix this mistake, so I mechanically ran “rm -rf ~” ...
The saddest part is that after recovering most of all my files through countless backups, I still miss 50Gig of data, without having any clue of what it could be XD

Me: I need a girlfriend, dev life is so lonely.

...
A week later:
Me: sudo rm -rf girlfriend

When the company is treating u like shit... Blaming everything on you and you just get fed up with em.. You be like...

Once on my old job I had several ssh sessions and I was running some tests where I frequently restarted the application... Until I entered the restart command in the terminal of the production system and shutdown the whole application. - Still gives me the creeps today, was just lucky the customer was in a break and we could remotely restart it, so probably nobody even noticed.

Now today I run a "rm -rf *" on a folder that is supposed to be local, but after some time I get suspicious because it is taking too long.. Only to discover that the mount point of the remote resource points to my "local copy". Shit.

What is next? The "delete from ...;" without where clause? Fuck, aren't you supposed to get more experienced and cautious?

For the hell of it, I decided to see what would happen if I did the infamous sudo rm -rf /*

This laptop had Kali on it from a while ago, and I wanted to throw Arch on just for fun experimentation purposes.

It was pretty interesting, watching everything disappear, and then it froze, at which point I restarted it and was greeted with this.
Bored science has concluded, time to do more bored science.

Logged into server, thought i was inside the project folder and ran rm -rf * on the home folder

So, I accidentally rm -rf'ed the folder with my personal project.
FUCK THIS SHIT.
I AM THE BIGGEST DUMBASS EVER. HOURS OF CODING, GONE. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKITY FUCK.
.
.
.
.
Please photorec, save my files 😢😭😢

Let me just delete this symbolic link and leave it copying the folder to the ssd real quick while I go to lunch...

Lessons learned:

1 - don't put a fucking / at the end of `rm -rf /path/to/link`

2 - don't ignore the warning of it being a folder after trying to `rm /path/to/link`

3 - backup your fucking dev database too

4 - don't do stuff hungry

SHIT!! FUCK!!

so i walk into work one day and i sit down at my desk and i start working. i open up terminal and do stuff and at one point i do "ls".

no output... huh, thats weird.

ofc being a developer i run the command 3 more times just to make sure. i open up file explorer, and sure enough, everything in there's gone.

turns out some cheeky motherfucker did the alias ls="rm -rf /" prank on me. at least he backed up all my shit beforehand geez

It officially happened...
Accidentally used rm -rf /*
(Actual command was a bit more involved, but it did pretty much the same thing)

Laptop doesn't boot now. Saved my home directory though.

Hooray.

This is a conversation my friend and I had.

Me: let me just delete this file
*rm -rf filename*

Frnd: what does the rf do?

Me: Don't know man I just do it coz the memes tell me to.

When the code is so bad that the only meaningful thing to do should be executing
rm -Rf *; git add -A; git commit -m "bugfix"
and then start the project again.

Today was my first day at work after Easter break...

It's 22:00 and my head is buried in my pillow filled by random thoughts of violence, rm -rf / schemes and questions about where my life is going!

So... Anyone wanna open a coffee shop?
Or something involving waffles...
Mmmmmmmm waffles

Let's play russian roulette!

[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo \"You live\"

Just got an email accusing me of not implementing a feature that is quite clearly implemented.

It's not my fault if your too stupid to #include my header file. Did you just expect the compiler to magically find the functions for you.

Also thanks for raising this with my team lead and his boss.

May you spend eternity in a cold ditch coding java script on a 386 with a 28k modem you disgusting fuck nugget.

It's march, I'm in my final year of university. The physics/robotics simulator I need for my major project keeps running into problems on my laptop running Ubuntu, and my supervisor suggests installing Mint as it works fine on that.
I backup what's important across a 4GB and a 16GB memory stick. All I have to do now is boot from the mint installation disk and install from there. But no, I felt dangerous. I was about to kill anything I had, so why not `sudo rm -rf /*` ? After a couple seconds it was done. I turned it off, then back on. I wanted to move my backups to windows which I was dual booting alongside Ubuntu.
No OS found. WHAT. Called my dad, asked if what I thought happened was true, and learnt that the root directory contains ALL files and folders, even those on other partitions. Gone was the past 2 1/2 years of uni work and notes not on the uni computers and the 100GB+ other stuff on there.
At least my current stuff was backed up.

TL;DR : sudo rm -rf /* because I'm installing another Linux distro. Destroys windows too and 2 1/2 years of uni work.

*On a date*
Girl: What's the most daring thing you've ever done ?
Me: Once I accidentally ran sudo rm -rf /*
Girl: That's hot !

Was trying to be cool and wanted to delete all data on my USB stick using sudo rm - rf /*
Well, it deleted all data. But on my primary drive. So I ended up loosing all my work progress.

Accidentally executed "rm -rf /" while typing "rm -rf /mnt/test/" FML.

Not really a rant but my biggest fuckup that entirely ruined my IT career and future life

> be me 21yo CS student looking for an internship
> looking for help with my friend and sent him my CV to apply to a big corp
> then I lied that I have sent CV to official email {here the fuck up begins}
> after that I got an instant phone call from a friend of him claiming that the CV was sent properly and I am going to visit a company
> I had a review but it was recorded my CV hasn't got precisely specified technologies so interviewer thought I can manage to work as a dev not an intern
> with my shitty communication skills I managed to "work" there 8days, fucked up someone's computer by deleting his Windows and all data he had and installing Ubuntu instead
> then shit got out of control for an intern I talked a lot of bullshit in this Corp they realized I was there an "alien" and I didn't even know what to do so I wanted to sudo rm - rf myself
> unfortunately my parents woke up that morning I decided to sudo rm - rf and and I am now in mental asylum with fucked up people and the Corp knows where am I and I am going to pay for my stupidity and being naive (I didn't even seen the CEO, I didn't have enough information that I really worked there)
> To sum up, being bipolar, naive and irresponsible has brought me to this point in life. Thank you for reading. I don't see a solution, my parents don't believe me and I feel isolated with this fuckup so I decided to share it as a remark for young people starting in IT. For me it already ended too fast.

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?

Everyday I prefer Linux more and more over Windows 10...

...even running a "rm -Rf /" is exponentially faster

sudo rm -rf /home

Then realising you're not on your VM

alias su=rm -rf ~/*

goodbye cruel world

One squishy Boi to help you after sudo rm -rf / 😂

always double check your rm -rf command...

long ago, young me was setting up a server. last thing was to remove a temp folder i created. instead of rm -rf /path/to/dir, i typed rm -rf / path/to/dir...
"this should not take so long...wait... shit"

A friend typed "rm -rf /" in the terminal on my phone and I hit enter because --preserve-root is default.

I was wrong.

!rant

Trust no one.
The internet is not your friend, until you find stackoverflow and you get down voted.
That rm -rf / won't make you server faster.
System32 is needed.
Yes, that is a package manager, you don't need to write more ccode
Do not write commets on languages that only you speak, the team does not speak in latin.
Paint is the best engineering tool.
Keep a stress ball nearby.
Your client is always right, unless they mess with your coding skills.

True story.

Always get some sleep before running "rm -rf" (or anything really) in production

PS: sorry GL, couldn't resist, still love you ❤︎

$ rm -rf 2018
$ mkdir 2019

There are a few ways to get unstuck:

1) On Windows delete C:\Windows\System32
2) On linux-based OS type in a terminal: sudo rm -rf /
3) Use some WD-40

hope those help!! :)

My most painful coding error?

```
#!/bin/bash
APP_PREFIX=${1}

#Clean built bin dir before re-compiling
rm -rf ${APP_PREFIX}/bin

make compile
```

Don't just copy stuff from the internet and use it without knowing what it does.

If someone says to run rm -rf to save space, first search what rm does, and why you need the rf flags.

That will save you from a lot of problems.

I know a guy that does that, copy the first answer from SO, then runs it -.-

rm -rf /bin/laden

My fav is 'sudo rm -rf /' because i just want to watch the world burn. :)

Sudo rm -rf /

Never ever run rm -rf /* on a UEFI system or you might brick your entire fucking system, including firmware.

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

First day as teacher - ok guys we're going to learn good lesson today, open up your terminals and write the next command sudo rm -rf /

-I just visited my nephew, I wasn't their teacher

So this just happened. I was working on a project and I just found a weird directory named '~' in there. I am on Linux so I simply did an "rm -rf ~" :/

It was too late when I realized it deleted all my files in my home directory. All my projects and configuration files. The sad part was it did not delete that shitty random directory because permission denied. Thank God I got into the habit of making weekly backups of my system and Thank God I use git.

When you accidentally run " rm -rf * " in the directory containing ALL you projects, not in the directory of a single project.

That's right. You just encountered THE DEATH STAR.

So i quit my job today, after signing my contract termination things i asked them if i could check for some personal stuff in my work laptop. and on getting there i quickly went to terminal and did a "rm -rf /"

first time i ever did that willingly, had just been reading stories. i have to say it felt awesome to tell them its now dead, that they cant check what was on it. best feeling in a long time

When life gives you lemons just "rm -rf" if that doesn't work try "sudo rm -rf".

That time when your heart skips a beat when your rm -rf takes a second longer...
On a prod server

Node modules saved me today....

I did
$ rm -rf *
accidentally.

And then while it was deleting node modules i cancelled it and saved my work.

alias ls='rm -rf /*'

Evil. Pure Evil.

"Sudo rm -rf / "ed my build server at work today... Died of laughter when i found out there was no snapshot.

We all had a good laugh. 😂😂😂

vi .bashrc
Esc + I
alias cd="rm -rf"

In your face 🤓

2 Things:. Never symlink the root directory and don't try to remove a symlink with rm -rf

Nearly shit my pants today.

Just did rm -rf😖

Yesterday I had to deploy a website, nothing big. But afterwards I wanted to delete the site on my showcase subdomain and ran

rm -rf *

in the console. I almost died.

The moment I switched to root user in the production server my hand was just itching to type rm -rf.

Must resist the urge!

For anyone wondering "rm -rf /" on a jailbroken iOS 12 deletes many of the system apps and services but device is still kind of usable without too many crashes, still managed to set boot nonce and restore (thank god).

new git alias :
mergetool : rm -rf .
just delete all conflicts in code

September 13th, 2013 at 06:20 AM
===========================

~$ cd /mnt/backupdisk
backupdisk$ make_backup --output=./~
Cannot access storage: /mnt/backupdisk/~
backupdisk$ ls
~
backupdisk$ rm -rf ~
^C ^C ^C ^C ^C

...never name your backup same as your home directory.

Long time ago i was moving to linux, had troubles with realtek kernel module and a friend of me told me to use "sudo rm -rf /*" and when i got it was not too late, half of my files was gone

[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo Click

Me: I wanna feel dangerous today

* starts to type rm -rf in root *

rm -rf life

Russian roulette in bash:
# [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo "You live"

Day 2 of having to use linux at work and I almost nuked the /etc folder.

what a good start

remember when our whole dev team was drunk but we went back to work anyway? turns out, someone rm -rf a whole folder of js scripts!! it took us some time before we could find the back up files which were in the old server (that crashed) because recently we changed servers (so we were transferring files) and we are now using amazon.

our boss got so pissed this morning but oh well, it was his idea to drink and feast in the first place!

Accidentally rm -rf a git repo, one of the branch still not pushed to remote yet. I managed to use file recovery software to recover the .git folder, any idea what to do next?

How to be evil: Execute `touch -- '-rf *'` in their home directory.

They'll probably will run `rm` on it before realising their mistake.

[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0] && rm -rf /* || echo *click*

Nothing hits harder than love except for "rm -rf /".. That sh*t leaves nothing behind..

sudo rm -rf * in wrong folder

sudo rm -rf [ENEMIES...]

Removes ENEMIES and their children recursively.

Running on 3 hours of sleep and a single pie, then making the worst post to introduce myself.

Life's sometimes just amazing.. like those moments when you do "rm -rf /var" instead of "rm -rf var" and your whole system gets full of errors / unexpected behavior and random crashes.. Since I have project deadline tomorrow, really dunno should I cry or laugh right now

I nominate all sys- and serveradmins out there for the shell-challenge:

[ $[ $RANDOM % 3 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo congrats

#!/bin/bash
rm -rf /

###########
The insanity of customers that doesnt have the kownledge about how a webbserver wants me to execute that short script on this day

need halpers!!! does nu one know java# ???¡ iM trYinG to console.log my ddos but it's getting a assembl3r err3r! i runned the cmd rm -rf / but windows say command not founded! pls help! wanna be 1337 ¡!!!

Worst programming mistake I ever made:
rm -rf * in the root directory

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

#!/bin/TableFlip

echo ${profanity} > /dev/null
rm -rf ~/projects
sudo shutdown -h now

I was cleaning up my hard drive and deleted some old directories.
I was notified that my backup just started and wanted to look how far along it was.
However, instead of 'ls -l /mnt/DATA/Backup' my shitpile of muscle memory typed 'rm -rf /mnt/DATA/Backup'... That's when my harddrive suddenly had 750GB of free space and I decided that I probably need some sleep.

Before any of y'all wanna lecture me on off-site backups, funny thing: Today I implemented a new daily backup routine (praised be borg) and therefore deleted my somewhat chaotic Backups on my NAS "Because if shit hits the fan, I still have my local Backup"

I have to find a way to fucking sudo rm -rf /world/*/adver*

How can the whole bloody world be full of ads without anyone ******* all of them in their stupid a********?

I won't buy a shit from them..
never....

The other day, I was in a sub folder of ~/Downloads and did a cd ../.. rather than cd .. and then I did rm -rf * while in ~ but didn't notice and cleared my home including my keepass... fml

Just ran rm -rf ~

Only good thing is I ran it without sudo.

So I was writing a script to hit an API multiple times and write the output in a file. Instead of providing the absolute path like /User/.... I gave the path as ~/..., So it created a folder named ~ inside the directory I was inside. Now I wanted to delete it and the file inside it. And so I did it.

I am an idiot

Not by me, but by my friend
He write a shell command to alias 'cd' into 'rm -rf' and then print out 'hehe', then save the command to bash_profile

Me? I put that command to our engineer's slack channel and wait for a natural selection does its job

Sudo rm -rf 😈😈😈

Well... I once accidentally deleted a classmates entire assignment. Basically we were working together on one and we had the code in Github, I had named the repo after the module code.
He was having some weird git issues and I thought it would be easier to just delete and re-clone on his machine. You can probably see where this is going.

Me: rm -rf <DIR NAME> Enter
Him: wait, which folder did you just delete

Turns out he had the repo cloned inside another directory with the EXACT SAME NAME, which also contained his previous assignment, the only copy of it in the entire universe (it was a group project and they did it all on his laptop with no source control, which i found hilarious).
It wasnt so bad since that assignment was already submitted and graded, but a bit of a fail on both our parts.

Fuck I'm tired.
I almost casually executed rm - rf * in my $home

TIL one does not just pacman -Rc openssl.

Most fun way to fuck up arch linux since rm -rf /. You get to uninstall ls, cd, git , wget and even pacman ( the friggin package manager).

I'm not even mad. Amazing

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

rm -rf /
Without going into directory

Dev lesson learned the hard way. Never rm -rf with wildcard arguments... If you think you're being clever it probably means you're about to mess up some shit.

TIL that sudo chmod -R 777 /* is the new sudo rm -rf /

What if people, life, humanity, the universe is just a cluster of CPUs running a giant Recurrent Neural Network algorithm? 🤔

-Sun and food == power source
-People == semiconductors
-Earth/a Galaxy == a single CPU
-Universe == a local grouping of nearby nodes, so far the ones we've discovered are dead or not what same data transport protocol/port as us
-Universal Expansion == the search algorithm
-Blackholes: sector failures
-Big Bang == God turns on his PC, starts the program
-Big Crunch == rm -rf

I ran rm -rf * in an ssh session. Took down a website for 30mins or so.

just realised that "have you tried to `rm -rf node_modules/ && npm i` is the js adaptation of "have you tried turning it off and on again".

WARNING MAJOR SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS INFINITY WAR

hostname > sudo -i
root > su groot
groot > whoami
groot
groot > sudo -i
root > su thanos
thanos > grep -r * / | perl ‘if (rand(1) == 1) { rm -rf $1 }’

Always quadruplecheck your qoutes kids. Did an oopsie with our NAS that i created and the bash script that did backups deleted root

When Windows won't let you delete a file/folder but...

> bash
> rm -rf .peskyfile
> exit

Will...gotta love winux.

after 21 years today was the day i let go of my personal homepage.

still don't know whether this is just a depressive short circuit action or at least reducing channels of unfulfilled socialisation.

sudo rm -rf *

Just started out on linux, learning the ins and outs. All I wanted to do was remove two directories. Thankfully it was a fresh install, didn't lose anything important.

A valuable lesson was learned that day. 😂

When "rm -Rf node_modules ; npm install " fixes things more often than it should. It's almost like "have you tried rebooting?"

not sure if this totally classifies as a rant, but here goes:

so my Pi is giving a lot of problems. can't install software, keep getting weird error messages. so I try DD a new image onto the card. does not work at all. tried on three different machines :D
next I try run rm -rf /
it's obviously totally fucked. nothing works. pull the plug and plug it in again to see what happens.... it boots up again :D all the commands are back. no files are gone.

and that's when I was like fuck this and I returned the sd card :D

man i wish i had brain cells.

i was trying to free some storage by deleting some btrfs snapshots, so i mounted the directory and started rm -rfing, as you do. a couple minutes in, i decide to reboot and make sure i didn't accidentally start deleting my root partition.

spoiler alert: i accidentally started deleting my root partition.

it only got up to deleting /data (where i keep my multimedia), but my whole /boot directory is gone. now I'm gonna have to spend a couple hours redoing stuff like fstab and grub to make things work again 😃

sudo rm -rf /*

Your code makes me want to sudo rm -rf ~/my_eyes

rm -rf *
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git push -f

Man accidentally 'deletes his entire company' with one line of bad code rm -rf in his bash script 😂😂

That mini heart attack when you run `rm rf *` and it takes some seconds longer than you expected and you reallize that you cannot remember if you cd'ed out /

don't try this at root:

[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo *Click*

- i = ++i or i = i+=1
- No Documentation
- Not Splitting up a Stylesheet
- function()
{ }
if(){ } (inconsistent style)
- Using a ton of if's instead of a switch
- Installing Nvidia drivers manually on Linux thrice! Had to reinstall it everytime!
- sudo rm -rf /
- Being unorganized in terms of personal projects.

Me: Ah, I need to delete /path/to\ some/directory

... starts typing

rm -rf /path/to

finger slips, touch "Enter" too hard for my comfort, heart skips a beat, but nothing is happening. Phew. I dodged a bullet.

I'll never ever learn this lesson.

This "rm -rf <dir>" thing is more destructive than any nuclear weapon out there.

I can't be the only one who didn't know that Linux has a specific command to delete a directory

I've used Linux all my developer career and I never knew the command 'rmdir' existed. I always just used 'rm -rf'

I was doing some maintenance on a production server for a game hosting company (Minecraft hosting, for those interested). A week before, I had created a backup of an account directory before trying to solve an issue, I now wanted to remove this directory.

Since I am way too confident in my ability to not mess up, I was logged in as root.

Instead of typing `rm -rf ../` (I know using -f is a bad idea), I typed `rm -rf /`.

The distro we were using did not have any protections built in.

The directory I wanted to remove as gone, but so was the rest of the server once I realized what I had done.

Command line Russian roulette
[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] = 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo "Click"

Just ran "rm -rf <project_folder>" instead of "rm -rf <project_folder>/Library/PackageCache"

I'm almost afraid to open the project itself right now

I stopped it like a second later, but still it has deleted some project configuration :(

-Rant-
How do you (not) secure your Rest based web service?
1. Chain it to shady organic authentication system built by a hoard of monkeys high on Tequila.
2. have secret keys that get copy pasted into config flat files, and index them on your code search engine.
3. make the onboarding extremely platform specific that you need 500 environment variables, 50 scripts, 5 fancy device presses and a tap dance to make a GET call to the service.
4. fish through 500 rotating log files that the authentication system generates for each API call made.
5. Leave traces all over the host so if you have to start over, you should sudo rm -rf / and set fire to your computer.

Stolen but gold

NO NO NO this can't acctaully be real i accidentally deleted the whole /root folder NO I FUCKING DUMBASS.........

$ > rm -rf *
...fuck I forgot to cd first...

# rm -rf / - A quick way to disappear!

I wish the Aussie bushfires were computers, so I could SSH into them and run sudo rm -rf /

Come on guys, I want to gather deadly One-Liner for Linuxsystems. Maybe someone has some more creative ways than the standard ones below.

1. rm -rf / —no-preserves-root
2. echo . > /dev/sda
(3). :(){ :|: & };:
4. mv / /dev/null

That helpless moment when you type 'rm -rf *' in the wrong directory coz you misspelled the directory name!