When they say "Run rm -rf /*"

[@Reavenk]

When Pixar was making ToyStory 2, legend has it that an errant command line wiped all of the movie assets and almost deleted the entire production of the movie. Then they realized a stay-at-home mom had a local backup at her house, and after restoring it they only lost 2 weeks of work instead of everything.

[@Virbox]

Wow, I didn't know that

[@cafebean]

only two weeks

[@ViewerEm]

@@cafebean compared to everything though

[@asdfssdfghgdfy5940]

Wtf why wouldn't a studio of that size be running multiple NAS's

[@Lin_The_Cat_]

Yep! In one of the later Toy Story movies, there's a scene where a car has a license plate and the plate ID is 'rm -rf /'

[@ΚωνσταντίνοςΟυρούμης]

If I had a coin for every time I have made a backup, I'd have zero coins. If I had a coin for every time I needed a backup, I'd have 5 coins 💀

[@Virbox]

Haha true story 😄

[@chinh4thepro]

id have atleast 15

[@wsketchy]

t...timeshift....? timeshift anyone..?!

[@그냥사람-e9f]

If I had a penny for every time I made a backup, I'd have like 30 If I had a penny for every time I needed a backup and were able to use one, I'd have 3 cent 🗿

[@ΚωνσταντίνοςΟυρούμης]

Black air force energy

[@mathgeniuszach]

You could also just use "--". In other words: "rm -r -- -f" "--" tells the command parser to stop professing flags and treat everything else as arguments.

[@PanDiaxik]

Or rm ./-f

[@zlorf_youtube]

Ohhh cool. Nice to know. Thanks

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

All the quotation marks and backslashes make no difference because they are being interpreted by the shell, and this is not a shell problem: it’s a problem with the behaviour of the command itself, that (normally) every word beginning with “-” is treated as an option, not a filename. The “./” prefix works in this case because rm is looking for file names. It wouldn’t work with other commands where the arguments are not file names. This is why the “--” convention was introduced, and is respected by many commands: it says “everything after this is an argument of some kind, not an option”.

[@pallas1634]

Or rm -r '-f', I thought that it worked because of (single quotes). Sorry.

[@mathgeniuszach]

@@pallas1634 Unless you're using some strange version of Linux, that command does not work.

[@someonestolemyname]

Things you shouldn't do - run shell as root - running stranger's code without checking what it does especially as root - not backing up your data - using rm without safeguard especially with -r and -f flags - not using gio trash, trashcli or other trash utilities which you can recover from

[@mrbanana6464]

Interactive flags for rm gives you alarm fatigue and makes you less likely to double check what you’re deleting

[@ChimeraX0401]

and not making snapshots so that you can just revert back when you broke your system

[@zackattack9228]

I am broke bro, I can't do backups

[@sleaf6]

I do all but one of these things

[@character640p]

@@zackattack9228 Use Rar and telegram bro

[@john_swanson]

change the world my final message goodbye

[@сосковыйёрж]

The thing is... If you do backups and the disk where the backups are stored is still mounted, sudo rm -rf /* gonna delete it too💀

[@rotteegher39]

btrfs subvolumes are separtare from what is mounted and you can't delete them even with rm -rf

[@erikkeever3504]

3-2-1: three copies total (including working), in two locations, one of which is off site.

[@ruslansanzharov5825]

Normally backups are mounted in read-only mode to prevent abuses like this

[@josephwhittaker2065]

Offsite backups ftw

[@Tryh4rd3rr]

@@erikkeever3504no, 1 other one is another format. Like 2 ssds and 1 hard drive etc.

[@blank001]

You should always take your PC's backup and store it on the same PC it saves a lot of space Source: trust me brah

[@louiesatterwhite3885]

At least store it on a different drive than your system drive 💀

[@user-xn3kt6bn5r]

@@louiesatterwhite3885 nah brah just make new partition. Save loads of $$

[@devrim-oguz]

The trash disappearing got me 😂

[@link_team3855]

HE DELETED THE TRASH BIN! AAAAAAA

[@private895]

A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN A BIN IN A BIN .

[@aya-hl5bk]

"Ok, lemme just LiveCD in" Funniest thing here

[@godnyx117]

*Cringest

[@WolfyRed]

@@godnyx117what?

[@godnyx117]

@@WolfyRed Did I stutter?

[@WolfyRed]

@@godnyx117 Fym? What is cringe about LiveCD

[@godnyx117]

@@WolfyRed Do you have a time machine?

[@callisoncaffrey]

The guy didn't like. The -f folder was gone, wasn't it? Edit: I meant "didn't lie" obviously.

[@callisoncaffrey]

@@monad_tcp I'm not. I'm using OpenBSD. Also you know there are other distros than suicide linux, right?

[@WolfyRed]

@@callisoncaffreywhat Tf is "suicide Linux"?

[@callisoncaffrey]

@@WolfyRed You type one command wrong and it deletes your hard drive. Can't recommend.

[@fltfathin]

@@callisoncaffrey same thing can happen in windows, there's a reason why there is administrator's code of conduct.

[@callisoncaffrey]

@@fltfathin What? Please state what you impression of me is.

[@filipsr4452]

rtfm :) POSIX.1-2008, volume "Base Definitions", section 12.1 "Utility Syntax Guidelines", item number 10: "The first -- argument that is not an option-argument should be accepted as a delimiter indicating the end of options. Any following arguments should be treated as operands, even if they begin with the '-' character."

[@Virbox]

bbut not all utilities are POSIX-compliant 🤓 (although GNU coreutils are)

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I wrote a generic packup-blend utility to pack up a Blender document and automatically include its external dependencies in a single archive, with support for tar, zip and 7z formats. Of the three, only the zip command did not recognize “--” in any form.

[@fltfathin]

if it were me i'd rename/ move that folder then delete it. guy was playing with fire to begin with

[@etaashmathamsetty7399]

Finally beluga but it's a Linux channel U deserve more subs

[@LinuxPlayer9]

That's what my brother has been saying

[@godnyx117]

The first part, gave me PTSD!!!! I once had a file in my home directory called "~". GUESS what command I run to remove it!!!

[@te4enie_donnyx_trav]

Damn😂😂

[@yusinwu]

Self-initiated homelessfication protocol

[@lukasjetu9776]

as a non bash user... please show me what command did you run

[@godnyx117]

@@lukasjetu9776 I was inside my home directory and I run: `rm ~`

[@lukasjetu9776]

@@godnyx117 what all did it delete?

[@ihavenoideadanny]

this is a rm -rf "$STEAMROOT/"* type of moment

[@Vienna3080]

He debloating Ubuntu

[@SodalisUK]

I actually had this happen on a real production IT system that I was working towards taking over the management of. I was working for an outsourcing company, and the system was in production and being operated and managed by the application vendor. The reason we hadn't taken it over was because there was zero operational documentation and zero scripted operations. So the vendor was operating it manually based on instructions scribbled on a scrap of paper. These instructions said: 1. "cd /tmp"; 2. "rm -yr *"; 3. "reboot". Unfortunately, one evening having done step one, the operator received a telephone support call and as part of answering that he went root (presumably with "sudo -i" which put him back in the root directory). When he finished the call he executed steps 2 and 3 without exiting root thus doing EXACTLY what this video shows. D'UH!!! To cap it all, it then turned out that the system backups hadn't been working either and hadn't been tested and it took them 2 or 3 weeks to rebuild this production system. DOUBLE D'UH!!!!!! I might add that this was one of two similar screw ups (the other resulting from deletion of the production SQL database) at the end of a disastrous fixed price application development where the system has already been rejected and redeveloped from scratch and where the initial go live was abandoned twice, once because an untested system timezone change caused it to fail, and once because the system has never been tested on a production sized database, and several missing indexes resulted in use response times on a linked production customer call healing system going from 1sec to over 30mins. Put simply a fiasco from start to finish from a MAJOR MAJOR software house.

[@horsepowermultimedia]

Sudo rm -rf /* is the System32 deletion of Linux.

[@_kitaes_]

more like deletion of / (hidden root folder in windows) that includes all partitions

[@fluoriteByte]

Its more like deleting the the whole C drive and all other drives that are attached

[@AgentPothead]

LMAO that Ducktales moon theme song hit out of no where.

[@martinhorner642]

I didn't believe it was that hard to quote '-f' to rm as it was shown in the video. So I wrote a program to create an actual '-f'. Now I have to rm -rf /*

[@GSBarlev]

I can't believe I'm saying this, but can't you just open a GUI file explorer and delete it from there? This actually happened to me a few weeks ago, but it was ".." and not "-f" My solution was to use python pathlib: >>> from pathlib import Path >>> files = Path(".").glob("*") (eyeball to identify the cursed file) >>> cursed_file.unlink()

[@sylv512]

all you have to do is “rm -rf -- '-f'”

[@BurzowySzczurek]

Nice Beluga style video. Keep going!

[@georgewang5516]

Thanks! Your video content is the safest and most useful

[@govindsanal3092]

That’s one way to take out the trash

[@dsihacks]

ba dum, tsss

[@andreasjoannai6441]

Me: Sees rm -rf knowing that's the linux equivalent of del Also me: Noticing it ends in /* In other words, running rm -rf /* deletes every system-accessible file and folder, bricking the OS.

[@zitrax506]

it's blatantly realistic, great video 🐧🖤

[@spaceowl5957]

This was so emotional and inspirational

[@rea9lizer]

It has been decades but Take off and land still gets me

[@3ndgamer28]

this command was run when toy story 2 was still being made but then some employee that worked there and had a backup of the files and everything was fine

[@randomname2437]

Bless photorec

[@chri-k]

would it be logical for rm -rf /.. to disintegrate everything connected to the system bus?

[@MikePainstill]

That " /* " makes all the difference in the system. So, wake up, Arch user, wake up and smell the upgrade bork.

[@UltraNyan]

Photorec - vomits all your files into a big pile

[@Geitungur]

That bit at the end reminded me of a story I heard where some serial killer took his laptop to a PC shop because it broke and when they fixed it it turned on to his desktop. With a bunch of photos of his victims. :|

[@pam4962]

I really, really thought that I was watching Beluga for a sec lol

[@aarnealplayzgames9580]

I wanted to sub to some random due who had no content and found you, gongrats… I guess?

[@oneandonly_h4]

Oh man I had that problem when I was first starting with Linux.

[@directx872]

rm -rf /* removes EVERYTHING so you effectively brick your system.

[@directx872]

@@parkman29 want to test your luck?

[@electric7487]

In 2016, on some machines with SystemD and UEFI, running "rm -rf /" or "rm -rf /*" could permanently hard-brick your machine since the filesystem containing the EFI firmware's configuration files, located at /sys/firmware/efi/efivars, was mounted read/write. They fixed this in 2017 by mounting them read-only.

[@Sh0071n6]

The first thing the noob at the terminal does = "sudo rm -rf /*"

[@nxx99]

my will to live when I started middle school

[@danielbelmir0]

i'm using git a lot for my projects, i know i'm the only that uses my programs but that's still a lot of work so it's good to have repositories on the internet to backup and be able to clone and push changes from any computer.

[@GSBarlev]

You'd also be surprised at who is benefiting from your code being out there. I've gotten into Minecraft modding, and there is *zero* documentation for anything, especially when a new version's just been released and you're trying to stay compatible. Oftentimes I'll search github for an import of the specific class I'm needing to reference and learn the proper usage pattern from a random mod with twenty downloads.

[@SNSISNSJISEJSJS]

And that's the moment that he remembered that he have fucked up 💀

[@sylv512]

are you referencing the homework folder 💀

[@SNSISNSJISEJSJS]

🤣🤣💀💀​@@sylv512

[@FeinesFabi]

Send them this instead so they (most likely) cannot recover their data: 'dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda bs=4096'

[@Virbox]

a real villain 😈

[@Noob-gb6bn]

What does this do?

[@electric7487]

​@@Noob-gb6bn It corrupts your disk with random gibberish.

[@Noob-gb6bn]

@@electric7487 aight thx, but how?

[@electric7487]

@@Noob-gb6bn /dev/random outputs random when it's called. The "if" stands for Input File, and "if=/dev/random" means you're using /dev/random as the source of the data to be written. "of" stands for Output File, and "of=/dev/sda" means that the data is to be written to /dev/sda. If /dev/sda is the location of your hard drive's main partition, you will corrupt your install and will force a format and reinstallation. An alternative is "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda", which overwrites /dev/sda with zeros instead of random data.

[@markusTegelane]

To be fair, this will eventually remove the `-f` directory

[@BloomDevelop]

Oh shit I remember that when I did this exact command on a container on a wsl (before I moved to Linux) and it deleted the whole wsl but at the cost of apps shortcuts vanished.

[@dadudeme]

I am familiar with this procedure. It is a pain to recover a whole windows system after writing rasbian over the first 2 gigs.

[@barneytf2]

Beluga, but he uses Linux. And I like it

[@ridndev_]

i once used multiflasher or whatever it is called and flashed my data backup instead of my USB drive 100 gb of "projects" down the drain

[@anywallsocket]

Yfw you run >rm file * instead of >rm file* 💀

[@edwolt]

Today I started running "rm -r /home" as root, I stopped it as soon as I see the mistake. I hope no important file was lost.

[@dtkedtyjrtyj]

rm -- -f might work But I suspect it wont format in KZbin.

[@Virbox]

This is also correct

[@RareScrap]

What a good ending!

[@alfaalfa993]

Why does he keep so many low-res photos?

[@sylv512]

that’s his homework folder always protect your homework folder

[@supercellodude]

I wonder how many normal distros (using glibc and most programs dynamically linked) try to have at least statically linked core utilities like rm. 'cuz, you know, once you delete glibc*.so*, rm might not be able to run anyways, but much of the system data would already be deleted

[@monad_tcp]

It's always able to run, because this is Linux, it memory maps the file then delete the reference to the inode and keep the inode until the program closes. Unlike windows, that will lazy load the executable and keep it both locked in the file system and memory mapped. The file system could technically unlink the record on the MIB, and keep the blocks loaded and memory mapped, so you can actually delete the file, but that's not how the DLL loader works. Which is incidentally why the system has to reboot for some updates, most of them are able to just be service restarts, but when it's kernel mode, they can't. You can close the file handles and delete things, which is even cool, as it's like pulling the rug from under the process, the process crashes after you delete the file, easy trick. I use it all the time, close the handles using process hacker and then delete files and watch programs cry and commit suppuku because their file handles became null. (some are able to deal with it, Explorer is one, which is good as it sometimes keep handles dangling locked)

[@sovietunion1989]

Everyone who watches Toy Story 2 will remember this

[@ZE_R0GT]

this seems like a beluga clone

[@naaaaaaaaathan]

rm -rf "-f" and you made it

[@sofiaknyazeva]

--no-preserve-root has left the chat

[@TheGoblinoid666]

Once I had to do this to remove a kally linux instalation, and it worked.

[@commandcracker42]

Use btrfs and you can run rm -rf /* any time you want

[@yeshwantkota230]

Tha one windows user: Wait, my os is giving me errors

[@Bob-bl1ey]

You don't have to type sudo, if u r already logged in as root

[@Iceozi]

Tip: Whenever running a Linux command, make sure to make a backup before doing it!

[@yuvalid4156]

How would you delete a folder named -f? Genuinely asking

[@Virbox]

Two options: 1) rm -r ./-f 2) rm -r -- -f

[@warmike]

@@Virbox or you know just use the gui

[@coffeedude]

@@warmike you can't if you are ssh-ing into a server

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Pro tip: if you are deleting a directory you know/expect to be empty, use “rmdir”, not “rm -rf”. Because “rmdir” will fail with an error if in fact the directory is not empty.

[@StrivingArrow]

How do I restore the files?

[@electric7487]

From your daily backup, of course.

[@polocatfan]

situation like this happened to me in a discord server. there was an issue going on with a library and they recommended I manually upgraded it. When I did that my system got bricked and when I told them they acted like they never recommended it and told me off. Turns out they got incredibly pissed off that I reported a bug in their "PERFECT PROGRAM" or thought I was lying so they decided to "prank" me so they intentionally sabotaged my machine. Told them to go fuck themselves and right before I left I saw a message that basically said "oops you were right...". fuck that nonsense. fuck all linux developers.

[@seekyboi23]

guild* 🤓🤓🤓

[@Adam_Lyskawa]

When you use clouds, you don't really need big backups. BTW, files you own end up owning you.

[@character640p]

Bro, what clouds do you use?

[@nothanks5531]

@@character640p guava ice geekbar

[@character640p]

@@nothanks5531 what does it even mean?

[@Paddy_1245]

Yea I ran it before in cmd and it broke my computer gpedit and regedit all gone😢

[@colour_bloo]

Nooooooo - not LMMS... It's going to take forever to re-install all those plugins 😢

[@toster9960]

you could just rm -r -- -f

[@पिज्जा]

The more terrible thing is mess up if and of in data duplicate command

[@antifurploppa]

i did that in my archiso and its boomed

[@Maruchipawa]

I have absoultly no idea wth this is about

[@retzerR]

I made a directory called -f, fix 2 ways 1. GUI 2. rm ./-f -r (without r it will complain about not being a file)

[@nikoszervo]

I dont make backups, I upload everything on the internet!

[@butlazgazempropan-butan11k87]

Its the "alt + f4" of linux

[@matthewlui1004]

A permission error you say, why not do sudo chown -R /

[@electric7487]

I actually did that once back when I was still using my old laptop. I was trying to install something and it threw lots of "permission denied" errors. Since I didn't know much about the Linux filesystem and file permissions at the time, I foolishly ran "sudo chown [username] -R /*" in an attempt to "fix it". The result? sudo isn't working anymore ("sudo: /usr/bin/sudo must be owned by uid 0 and have the setuid bit set"), even pkexec errors out ("pkexec: must be setuid root"), and a lot of other programs throw errors. When I tried to reboot my system it would always hang before getting to the login screen. Turns out that sudo, ssh, sendmail, pkexec, the login binary, and many other applications require filesystem permissions checks in order to run safely since they would open up too many security holes otherwise. When I ran "chown" on my entire root directory, it compromised everything. The worst part about running any sort of chmod or chown recursively is that it's lossy and irreversible by nature, and doing on the root directory is especially dangerous. I ended up making a backup of my data and reinstalling Ubuntu over my home folder since it was too much hassle reverting everything back.

[@KangJangkrik]

Just like PDN admins, except they won't bother to restore

[@hairynamjari790]

Just run rm -r -- -r

[@gdplayer1035]

windows user moving to linux

[@Pwnagotchi-0]

I could learn something from you guys

[@Plumjet09]

Technically it did delete it

[@AnimeZNT_15]

Nahh bro just told him to delete all files in root directory

[@calculator_gaming]

what dies rm -r ./-f do?

[@ЛордКекер]

he said '-r -f', no '-rf'

[@rotteegher39]

That's why I use btrfs or zfs

[@ch4n4o2]

Who needs backups if you can just reinstall the system

[@methanbreather]

you know - if your file system supports snapshots, it isnt that bad....

[@Lucas-ky7dc]

Wait, `rm -r \-f` wouldn't work? Well, guess I need to test that myself.

[@jakdziala]

I guess it's maybe because of the backslash, linux uses the forward ones upd: yep, he wrote that in the description

[@chri-k]

@Watcher no, you escape the character “-“, which yields “-“, and so that backslash does absolutely nothing

[@natywubet2175]

rm is depreciated, use shred instead

[@craftrumzen2393]

What about 'rm -r ~./-f' ?

[@philosophicalgamer2564]

This should be an amine

[@kokodi01]

silly little me did sudo chmod /* 000, worst mistake of my life.

[@m4rt_]

no rm -r -f /* --no-preserve-root

[@mustangrt8866]

just cp lib and src, rm rf the projects and make new projects folder

[@InfiniteCoder01]

Actually you need "rm -rf /* --no-preserve-root"

[@sylv512]

distro-dependent, i think

[@NoobDeSupreme]

HAHAHA This is so true XD.

[@link_team3855]

... is 'sudo rm -rf' the alt F4 of linux?

[@Tom-uy4io]

It's the delete C:\ of linux It deletes every single file on your drives, every single file on any USB drives attached. Even network drives get wiped.

[@leo_craft1]

Just rm "-f"

[@surplus2720]

My braaaaaaaaaaaaaaain is in buffer overflow help me plis

[@EmoonX]

"[~user/]$ rm -rf / rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on `/' rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe" At least they're nice about offering a second chance.

[@joaomachado9105]

amazing

[@mutafyanny]

what os was that