this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Foolishness (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Excuse me, but that type of foolishness requires -- no-preserve-root nowadays

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Not in this case. It's */ here so it expands to directories at current location. I'm sure that's a typo though

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm not brave enough to test it on my distro, so I'll take your word on that lol

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (4 children)

You can do echo */ and echo /* to see how they expand. Also rm -rf / already is enough without the * as it already is recursive

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

* is there to bypass the need for --no-preserve-root

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

rm -rf / needs --no-preserve-root on GNU coreutils, I think.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

why do they even have that lever

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Originally, rm would merrily nuke your whole filesystem if you told it to. At some point, someone thought that was a pretty stupid default behaviour, so they added that flag to change the default to not nuke your entire filesystem. However, they made the change backwards compatible in case someone still needed the old behaviour. I can imagine in a container or throwaway environment, it might be vaguely reasonable to expect to be able the blat /.

See also:

Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself -- and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure.

-- Eric Allman

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I'm aware of how recursive force remove works. I'm just kidding around.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Anybody brave enough to tell the MS rep this on patch night??

(You have backups, right?)