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Who hasn't typed a risky command? Throw the first stone! (programming.dev)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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Sudo rm -rf .

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[–] 59 points 7 months ago (15 children)

DOS user detected! In linux you don't need *.*, you can just use *

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  • [–] 35 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Maybe he wanted to remove only files with a dot in the name

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    And if he’s on / (root) on most common distros, there won’t be any dirs with . (dot) in their name. Unless this matches the dot from the cwd, in which case this is the same as “rm -rf /“? Now I’m curious, I don’t often perform operations on the cwd using dot.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    At least bash doesn't seem to match it...

    gregor@raspberrypi:~ $ ls
bridge  navidrome  seed  traefik
gregor@raspberrypi:~ $ ls *.*
ls: cannot access '*.*': No such file or directory
gregor@raspberrypi:~ $ cat *.*
cat: '*.*': No such file or directory
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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

    Right, so then if asterisk wildcards don’t match on . and .. then, in most common distros where there is no dot in any of the top level dirs in /, “rm -rf *.*” in the top level / dir is basically harmless and likely a noop.

    So OP is wrong.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    well, depending on your shell

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Which shell interprets * as everything before extension?

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Well I’m not necessarily commenting on the *.* but * will skip .files in bash.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I think *. * also skips them

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    *.* will likely expect a file named *. and then delete any file globbed, but still leave dotfiles. At least in bash.

    In my shell it would just error at me and then I’d be mad fish doesn’t work like bash in this specific case

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