this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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Who hasn't typed a risky command? Throw the first stone! (programming.dev)
submitted 17 hours ago by calango@programming.dev to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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Sudo rm -rf .

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[–] lena@gregtech.eu 4 points 12 hours ago (1 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
[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

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.