for real though, modern linux distros will rarely require you to enter a command line, and if you do, a quick internet search can usually help you find out what you need to enter
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2021
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I've lived in various Unix terminals for the last decade+ and cmd.exe scares the shit out of me. Well no it doesn't, but I hate it and I'm always pretty sure I'm about to brick the whole computer. Which is an improvement tbf if it's running Windows
it's awesome how every tutorial on how to change anything deep about Windows starts with "Hit
Win+Rand typeregedit.exe. WARNING: Editing your Windows registry can have potentially catastrophic results for your system. Please make a restore point before following this tutorial."Meanwhile it's 100% possible to torch your system without warning with
rm -rfin the wrong place and I love that.what's rm-rf?
rmis the unix command for remove — it deletes files and directories.The
-rflag, or--recursiverecursively traverses all the directories in the path file that you specify (so like if you have a directorystuff/which has filesa.txt,b.pdf, and subdirectoryc/thenrm -r stuff/would remove both files as well asc/and its contents.The
-fflag, or--force, does what it says on the tin: it deletes everything without prompting you or warning you about what it's going to delete.So it's possible to delete all the files on your system — including ones that the operating system needs to run — with
rm -rf /. It's very hard to do on accident these days — usually you need superuser permissions (thesudoinsudo rm -rf /) which requires you to enter your administrator password and to also pass the flag--no-preserve-rootwhich was created to keep people from deleting their whole system because someone named pigpoopballs69 on a random forum said to runsudo rm -rf /So what would happen if you just did "rm stuff/" without the recursive flag? Shouldn't it work the same way and delete all of stuff/ contents?
also how do you do that code font thingy
rm stuff/without the recursive flag fails with an error (rm: cannot remove 'stuff': Is a directory) and doesn't remove anything. I'd guess the decision there was to have the least-destructive end result for ambiguous behavior, but I'm not entirely sure what the history is there, pretty sure that command is older than I am :)The code font thingy is the back tick character: `