this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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Sudo rm -rf .

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[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 2 points 59 minutes ago (1 children)

There's an ancient UNIX copypasta that's basically the plot of this comic, but it's troublingly hard to find the original online.

Here's one version I found: http://www.anvari.org/fun/Web_Tina/CREATION.html

I don't remember "technocrat" being part of the original, but it wouldn't be the first time my recollection has been wrong.

[–] calango@programming.dev 1 points 49 minutes ago

Hahaha that's funny

[–] RustyShackleford@programming.dev 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Don't forget to add the -v to see the apocalypse unfold in real-time!

Alabado sea El Omnissiah.

  • El Señor Archmagos Miguelito Malparido Hijo de Puta VII
[–] hakunawazo@lemmy.world 1 points 20 minutes ago

Thats what this is for:

tail -f earth.log
[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

DOS user detected! In linux you don't need *.*, you can just use *

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 12 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Maybe he wanted to remove only files with a dot in the name

[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

And if he’s on / (root) on most common distros, there won’t be any dirs with . (dot) in their name. Unless this matches the dot from the cwd, in which case this is the same as “rm -rf /“? Now I’m curious, I don’t often perform operations on the cwd using dot.

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 3 points 1 hour 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 59 minutes ago* (last edited 58 minutes 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.

[–] calango@programming.dev 5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

God programmed the universe into DOS

[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 hour ago

This explains a lot.

[–] prettybunnys@piefed.social 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

well, depending on your shell

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Which shell interprets * as everything before extension?

[–] prettybunnys@piefed.social 3 points 1 hour ago

Well I’m not necessarily commenting on the *.* but * will skip .files in bash.

[–] suicidaleggroll@lemmy.world 8 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Decades ago I ran an "rm -fr *" as root, I thought that I was ~/bin, but I was in /bin. That was a fun lesson.

[–] prettybunnys@piefed.social 4 points 1 hour ago

Production system, first day, did it at / and it wasn’t until I saw /bin scrolling by that I realized my mistake.

Luckily it was a stateless system and a reboop brought it back but i learned a valuable lesson that morning.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 hour ago

I got into this bad habit of trompsing around as root on our dev systems at work because who gives a shit we abuse and reprovision those systems all the time.
But then I find myself at home on one of my home servers or desktops fumbling around as root. Because I don’t want to constantly run sudo. Fortunately nothing bad has happened, bad enough to be memorable anyway, in the last 20 years or so. I guess I’m still pretty careful. Or lucky.

[–] Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 14 points 6 hours ago

That's not how you remove the French

[–] LordCrom@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Well, you can't call yourself a computer expert until you erase your entire drive or make it unbootable at least 3 times.

[–] ttyybb@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

Well I'm 2/3 the way to being a computer expert (Technically I would be at 3/3 at least, but taking bad updates is a repeate and doesn't include me messing around with stuff)

[–] Scoopta@programming.dev 5 points 5 hours ago

resizepart 1 128 Instead of 128GiB ...bad day

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago

did that once but instead ran rm -rf / instead of rm -rf ./

[–] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Silly god! You just had to chattr -i !

"All-knowing" my ass. Half-baked deity can't even gentoo.