Everyone asks what is rm but nobody asks how is rm.
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
127 points (97.7% liked)
Programmer Humor
40120 readers
2 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
No one ask when rm is.
Those French dictionaries are massive.
fr fr
Don't delete the french language pack, it's vital to the OS
rm -fr /
sudo rm -r . /
Nobody deletes β./β. Itβs far far more likely to be β/ tmp/fileβ
Also, without the -f it will prompt you. Chances are, the meme is with -f
The other possibility, though I havenβt tested it, is the working directory is / and they did βrm -rf .β Without first checking with pwd. I know that most OS will refuse to remove root without passing in a special flag nowadays. Only a few OS still respect you as sudo.
Though the check isn't very sophisticated, if memory serves. It more or less checks whether / is passed to rm -r.
If you did something like rm -r $VAR/*, but didn't check to make sure that $VAR was set and not empty, it could still fire, since rm wouldn't see that root got passed, only a bunch of directories in root.
I always add rm flags AFTER the paths. So then I double check the path after adding the flags.
call me paranoid or stupid but i always use the graphical file manager whenever i can to delete stuff for this very reason.
rm -i: Am I a joke to you?
Yes. Yes it is. Why would I type an extra flag? It should be the default.
alias rm='rm -i': Am I a joke to you?
Honestly I was cleaning up some docker stuff today..
So I'm
rm -r /mnt/NVME/opt/folder(s)
Hit the refresh button in my gui file browser and it was still there. Lol Took a good 15 seconds for it to vanish.
Crazy. But idk why I expected it to be instant.
Use trash-put and trash-cli.
I do the opposite. Whenever I delete anything I use rm -rf /full/path/to/file
Just starting to type that triggers a fear response and makes me triple-check what I'm doing.
Honestly, this idea has me pretty mortified as well. Just seeing βrm -rf /β as part of a string sends chills down my spine.
Granted, any reasons or explanations to cause a string being cut short to this godforsaken form and accidentally run is extremely unlikely, but a valid theoretical possibility: I can easily imagine someone mistyping the first letter after root and, wishing to delete it, pressing Backspace while simultaneously accidentally grazing the Enter key.
Sure, the chances of it happening are about the same as a gun user accidentally dropping their gun, clumsily catching it in the air and accidentally shooting someone right in between the eyes as a result.
In that case you should try rmz to speed it up again
is there any coreutil that doesn't have a "poweruser" rewrite in rust that does the same thing but in color
This is where we sort the younglings from the grizzled veterans that backup and test their backups. Haven't lost a file since 2002.
I had a coworker preparing a customer database that arrived via sneakernet. He typo'd a variable during an rm -f step and ended up wiping the device because it was his working directory and the variable was undefined.
Last evening, I deleted a file by mistake in my dhcp server. Five minutes later I had recovered the file from the previous night's backup and was going about my merry way as if nothing happened.
If humans can make mistakes with the files, you should consider having backups. Having backups is something you decide to engage in BEFORE you have a loss event, so that you are prepared for when humans make their mistakes.
I am a human, and I know I make mistakes, therefore I prep even my silly infrastructure at home to defend against my sillyness.
..and this is the reason I added this to my root .bashrc:
export PS1="\h:\$(realpath .)\$ "
no more following symlinks on a remote mount and forgetting about it.
Gives you plenty of time to contemplate your backup strategy
At a previous job I remember a PR to do essentially
temp=$(mktemp -d) mv $target $temp rm -r $temp &
I thought it was pretty clever. Obviously you would need to make sure mktemp is on the same filesystem (there are good flags to just use a dot file in the current directory). mv is atomic on most filesystems and then the & just runs the rm in the background .
I fail to see the benefit of that script.