What happens when you sudo rm -rf / your machine?

Let's find out !

:P

[ChristopherGray]

ls
bash: no such file or directory

thats when you know your fucked

[e-berry]

And the computer is in the middle of an existential crisis:
*whoami: command not found*

[heh_boaner]

Arch Linux users be like: "Fully customizable"

[lxgn]

If you run this as the root user, instead of your user with privilege acess (by using sudo) It will delete even some /sys/files related to the communication between your hardware - operating system.

Basically, It will instantly crash.

[KevinSheppard]

The saddest part for me was when he tried to go home and the computer said he had none :-(

[roua.]

i wanna see someone do this then fix it just enough that it would reboot, great speedrun potential

[FoxBlocksHere]

User (elevated): DELETE EVERYTHING
Windows: Uh, are you _really_ sure you want to do that? I mean, you're the boss, but...

User: sudo DELETE EVERYTHING
Linux: okay :)

[zorzem]

Tip you can use echo * as opposed to ls in case ls is not on the $PATH since echo is a bash builtin

[timesInversedto]

That's the simplest self destruction command.

[moetop]

I did this once. I thought I was in a different directory. This was in the days of Slackware, where I had already spent hours compiling my kernel and downloading applications over a modem and compiling then installing them by hand. Luckily the modem was 56k :P

[bettkitty]

I did this on Ubuntu WSL and it started going through the Windows filesystem. I eventually noticed this and stopped it, but by then, it already wrecked the Ubuntu install, lol. Thankfully, Windows still worked!

[AshleyNewson]

"Hey, look, I ran `sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root` on a live CD! That was fun! Wait, why won't my normal system boot?"

*cries in auto-mounted hard drive partitions*

[benargee]

I like how you try to use ls multiple times when it says ls doesn't exist 😂. Clearly not a builtin shell command.

[DevianLLC]

Happened the same thing on a car entertainment system when I tried to delete a folder. At the end it deleted something from the /bin directory and the system crashed immediately. For some reason the /bin is stored on an external 8MB NOR memory, it was PITA to desolder the BGA package memory, solder small wires, restore the content from a backup and solder it back, I am sure it only deleted from the /bin directory because every file was still available on the eMMC.

[pcup-off]

User: "I want to delete everything"
Windows: "Nope, not gonna do it. That'll kill me"
Linux: "lol go ahead"

[edurico]

Where...? Who? Who am I? Wanna go... Wanna go home. Go... Where...

[BecomeMonke]

I tried running this on windows subsystem for Linux for fun. Until I realized windows drives are mounted in the WSL storage also

[rationalcoder]

This can realistically happen if you try to remove a temp directory like rm -rf "$TempDir/*" and TempDir is empty. I did that at work one time, and it was in a script that was run with sudo, so... Good thing we had backups...

[epenies]

I shall call this “computational dementia”

[fatpancake]

i did `sudo rm -rf /* --no-preserve-root` on my actual home pc one time, because i was going to re-install my os from scratch. apparently linux has some issues with it after a reboot because the installer's kernel panicked. I ended up having to re-format my disk using tinycore on a usb and then i was able to re-install like normal. I also did some research and apparently doing `sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root` bricks the computer, which means i was one character away from having to buy a new computer.