And also a short delay before printing 'lucky boy' so you can't tell if it's deleting everything or if it's the built in delay.

On modern Linux system yes but old Unix servers (or even recent?) would run it no problem

Edit: It was initally introduced by sun microsystems in 2005 and was later adopted by GNU

Sun Microsystem didn't introduce it in 2005, rather it simply disallowed rm -rf / altogether

Later GNU introduced --preserve-root and after that made --preserve-root the default and added --no-preserve-root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rm_(Unix)

In my limited knowledge it randomly generates a number and if this number can be cleanly divided by 6 it deletes everything on the system (and the system itself). If not it prints 'lucky boy'.

So basically the nerd version of russian Roulette. But with higher stakes

It's a bash command that generates a random number. If that number divides by six with no remainder then it deletes everything on the server, if not it prints "lucky boy". "Prod" servers are production servers, the ones the actual business runs on, as opposed to test or dev servers which are often deleted and rebuilt as developers to see if things work or not.

This is Russian roulette for IT people to see if they destroy the running server or not

They're basically playing Russian Roulette with their servers. They condition a remove all command on a random numbers generator and pray. If it does not wipe the server, it spits out "Lucky Boy"

alias rm="echo Lucky boy"

That would print "Lucky boy -rf /" though, quite suspicious

I’d hope that one’s production server is backed up.

Yeah, all this means is that you're gonna have to spend time restoring from backup. Right?

Risky click of the day