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Who hasn't typed a risky command? Throw the first stone! (lemmy.nz)
submitted 6 months ago by calango@programming.dev to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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Sudo rm -rf .

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[-] jaybone@lemmy.zip 10 points 6 months ago

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 6 points 6 months ago

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 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months 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.

[-] lena@gregtech.eu 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Technically, it says he's in the ~ directory, which would usually be /home/god, but even in there there aren't usually any directories/files with a dot.

[-] psud@aussie.zone 1 points 5 months ago

~ has many dot directories and files

this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
513 points (97.4% liked)

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