in reply to Re: rm -rf /
in thread rm -rf /

Strangely, I am not too keen on trying this on my own machine. But would it not delete all files owned by the user? That is, does the rm command continue through its recursion after a permission denied?

I'm actually less concerned about losing system files than personal files. I rarely if ever change the system files, and even though I back up my personal files relatively frequently I'd be more than a little irritated to lose the changes since my last backup.

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Re^3: rm -rf /
by zentara (Cardinal) on Aug 14, 2004 at 12:37 UTC
    If you run it as a user, it will hit /home which is owned by root, and give a 'permission denied', and it won't recurse into /home. The script would be more dangerous if it eval'd to /home/$user, or on windows C.

    By the way, I didn't run it from my ~home ...... I have an expendable test user solely for testing such scripts. :-)

    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh
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