On 2019-08-17 08:42, Jonathan Billings wrote:
On Aug 17, 2019, at 9:25 AM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I like this one. Long-long ago it was one of the “tricky” questions at the UNIX admin test (exam). Basically, no matter how devastating that may sound, the command only will remove what is (alphabetically it was that time) before /dev/[root_device]. Once the device root filesystem lives on is removed from /dev, no further damage is done. So, you will be able to mount drive on another machine and get your /etc, /home, /var, /usr/local intact ;-) Asking that question other people gave me (an them usually) a lot of fun.
I’m not sure what UNIX systems where that’d actually happen, but on Linux systems, removing the device in /dev/ would not deter rm from being able to delete everything else on the mounted filesystems.
Certainly if you were using some sort of automount system, and the filesystems hadn’t unmounted, it would be fine.
Thanks, everybody, for confirming that on Linux
rm -rf /
does lead to devastating result. Just for fun I tried the same on
FreeBSD (12.0 RELEASE - which is latest release):
root@point:/home/valeri # cd
root@point:~ # whoami
root
root@point:~ # rm -rf /
rm: "/" may not be removed
Somebody is really clever in this World ;-) Well, FreeBSD folks made my
day (again!). Note, that that I did on my live workstation (yes, I did
test it on throw-away system first ;-) - so I can copy and paste what I
got to this email.
Valeri
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Jonathan Billings <billings@xxxxxxxxxx>
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Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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