484
Who hasn't typed a risky command? Throw the first stone! (programming.dev)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
35 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Sudo rm -rf .

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 35 points 7 months ago (5 children)

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

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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
  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •