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what happens when you give the command in the command line rm -rf ? (hear-me.social)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
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@nostupidquestions what happens when you give the command in the command line rm -rf ?

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[–] 3 points 2 months ago*

Short answer: Nothing

Long answer: It is part of a command that deletes everything. The only thing missing is the argument specifying what to delete. Examples:

rm -rf *
rm -rf /some/directory

It's somewhat (in)famous because it'll do so without asking for confirmation. The only exception is rm -rf / on a modern distro which will complain that you're attempting to delete EVERYTHING on the system. In the olden days it'd just do it, but these days it tells you to add --no-preserve-root as well if you really wish to do so.

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