What Happens When You Run “rm -rf /”

Posted by Sander_Marechal on Nov 1, 2007 7:34 AM EDT
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I’ve known for a long time to stay away from the short, sweet and simple “rm -rf /” command. It deletes every file on any writable filesystem mounted by a *nix system, but what exactly happens if you do run it? Do green leprechauns jump off the screen to warn you that you shouldn’t do it? Not quite. Here’s a video with the verbose option set to make it a little bit more interesting. I’m running it in a virtual machine so I can capture video of all the “action” - it was a bit slow to complete, but I’ve gone ahead and increased how quickly it runs to not be nearly so boring. Enjoy!

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