Linux Best Practices

alphacyberranger@lemmy.world to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 1522 points –
125

Don't run this command unless you want to delete all the files on your system and break Linux on your system.

is linux that dependant on French? wow

Did you know? Linus Torvolds is actually the consort child of two french people! That's why you have to use the french flag when removing folders, it's an ode to his upbringing

It's actually called "Le Nux" but it had to be changed so it wasn't too controversial for the rest of the world

So what you’re saying is, it is true that I will no longer have French installed.

Find that out the hard way?

Do you just hate the french that much? Because I do.

I get these are jokes but I really don't find anything funny about it, it becomes a meme and then people start getting more creative and pushing it more and being more covert and people come up with other little japes then new Linux users get their shit destroyed and maybe important info gets lost or precious memories so they say Linux is a piece of shit and go back to windows.

It's not even funny to start with so when it inevitably inspires people to be assholes and bullies that's all we've achieved.

It's the new "delete system32 to get better performance"

Lol rm -rf as a joke isn't new anyway

except you probably delete more than system files which could be easily restored from an install disk

I totally agree. We should be more open and welcoming to new users. Imagine some new people on the steam deck being curious and diving into Linux and running into this. Undoubtedly, we'd lose at least a few users that brick their machines.

I get that this humor fits and entertains the technically inclined of us, but if we truly want more widespread use of Linux, shouldn't we open our arms to less technical users as well? Besides, even for the more technical of us, this joke is so old and run down πŸ™ƒ

Eh, this is a classic joke by now. There's those jokes on the Windows side too (like the 'delete system32' one).

Except that you cannot actually delete System32 on Windows like you can delete your whole drive on Linux.

You can't do this on Linux anymore either. Unless you are on a way out of date system, you need to add the --no-preserce-root flag as well. And I think it still prompts you to make sure it is really want you want to do.

WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed. This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!

You are about to do something potentially harmful. To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'

User: gleefully types in the phrase

Knowing some of the people I have to support on a daily basis, yeah I don't see this stopping some people lol

It certainly didn't stop Other Linus!

But here it's deleting /* and not / so I think it won't prompt you for that flag, but I'm not about to try it

In NT4, you could delete ntldr. Next time you reboot, you have a dead system that was a relative PITA to recover. Generally just wipe and reload.

So many users trying to gain more disk space on those 210 MB hard drives..

God you just gave me flashbacks of trying to delete files that I was only 60% sure of what they did. Just so I could have room to install some custom rad new mouse cursor icons.

With only a little bit of malware on the side

Yes, but also I would hope that if you have the autonomy to install linux you also have the autonomy to look up an unknown command before running it with superuser privileges.

That's making an assumption that a brand new Linux user knows they are running the command with superuser privileges.

Half the time you websearch a problem you are having in Linux you will find someone telling you to fix it by running a command that starts with sudo without explaining what any part of the command does. New people probably regularly run those commands without finding out what it does and it probably works (or at least does no harm) a good portion of the time because most people aren't dicks. So then you've got new people trusting that form of advice.

It's hard to blame them, they are new to the system and very few experienced users are going out of their way to explain the basics to new users.

I'm around 20 years Linux user and I'm still installing various soft by curl bashing a script from their site.

Trusting official installation instructions from the software developer might be a step or two down from trusting your distro's package maintainers, but it's still several steps up from trusting random advice from a forum or chatroom.

And with the possible exception of Ken Thompson or Ben Eater, we've all got to trust somebody.

It's a word play that many people find funny. It's also a call back to something you might have done as a newbie when messing around that people find funny, like talking about that time you thought tried to wash okra after chopping or mixed coloured and white clothes in the laundry. A horrifying experience when it happens but something that you usually find funny later on in retrospect.

Apart from that sudo in Linux comes with enough warning labels to say that it should only be used when you know what you're doing. Running unknown commands on terminal is dangerous, like trying to play with the stuff under the hood in a car. Both of these facts are abundantly made clear with big red warning signs in every single reputable source you look up for any popular distro.

I mean, I'm pretty tech savvy, but I fell for a troll when setting up a CUDA cluster once. Typed some command I thought would remove an old driver, wiped the system and I started from scratch.

I learned to understand every command before blindly typing it in.

It was funny when I was a sixth grade punk. Now it's just cringe worthy.

"It was funny when I used to do it but now I don't like them anymore so everyone else should stop."

It's okay, nay, good to realise that something you do or did was harmful and change your opinion of said thing. It's how you grow as a person.

They haven't actually acknowledged it being harmful, they just said it was cringe worthy. You don't have to like everything but it's hypocritical to complain about others' sense of humour, for something you yourself once enjoyed.

No evidence of character growth here...

None of your objections so far have come close to resembling good faith rebuttals. Or even good ones.

We have eyes, we've read the tweet, we (I would hope) know what invoking rm -rf / does. Presumably the context alone there and reading the room here should be enough to clue one in why one would find it specifically cringeworthy (even if I would probably use a tamer way to describe it-personally), and why perhaps one would in the exact same vein just find things funny for different reasons, or just find different things funny altogether. How is it hypocritical to acknowledge the humor in a joke while pointing out that the same joke carries an uncomfortable truth to it? Sometimes those are the best jokes (best of course being subjective)

Of course, I got the joke straight away and merely chuckled. Not necessarily my brand of humor, but hey, you buy the premise, you've bought the bit.

I'm not sure where good (or bad) faith comes into it, they expressed their opinion and I expressed mine. It's a public forum where we're allowed to disagree so I'm not really sure what you're trying to get at, I feel perhaps you're reading into this a bit too much.

I did the same as you, I saw it and chuckled a bit at the humour. It wasn't hilarious, but I found it amusing and I felt like the comment I replied to was a bit harsh, so I put a spin on it.

I feel from your reply like I've annoyed you somehow and I'm sorry if that's the case, it wasn't my intention.

I made a comment about my preferences and now I'm a hypocrite because I don't share yours? Let's temper the conversation here, we're not analyzing individual levels of human goodness based on individual comments.

Please continue to find whatever thing is funny to you as funny. I will continue to opine where I decide on my tastes. Glad we have this understanding.

It's not because you don't share my tastes, I thought it was hypocritical to call it cringe when you mentioned you also used to enjoy this humour. That's as far as it goes.

I agree with what you're saying about taste. Just let people enjoy what they wanna enjoy as long as it isn't hurting anyone.

This is a meme page... I would get this comment if it was in a linux community

It'll be a good learning experience for anyone who runs commands seen on this community.

They don't need learning experiences with Windows. Lot of folks dont want to learn, they wanna do things like browse the web, game, work on their jobs, ect. They need a system that just works

Careful, you have to also add --no-preserve-root to make sure you get all of it out. If you leave the roots, it'll just grow back later!

(But seriously, don't actually do this unless you're prepared to lose data and potentially even brick your computer. Don't even try it on a VM or a computer you're planning to wipe anyway, because if something is mounted that you don't expect, you'll wipe that too. On older Linux kernels, EFI variables were mounted as writable, so running rm -rf / could actually brick your computer. This shouldn't still be the case, but I wouldn't test it, myself.)

Fun fact, rm -rf /* does not need --no-preserve-root. It will happily start as technically, according to the preserve root check, /* is not root as the target is not /

It's slightly different. Your shell will see the /* and replace it with all the directories under /, e.g. /bin /dev /etc /home etc. So the actual command that runs is rm -rf /bin /dev /etc /home etc.

Careful, you have to also add --no-preserve-root to make sure you get all of it out. If you leave the roots, it’ll just grow back later!

Oh my god I effin guffawed, thanks for that

I ran it in Hyper-V once to see what happens and it deletes all the boot entries from the VM firmware (including pxe boot and the dvd drive)

I have checked this and can confirm that after entering this command, there is no more French in the system. πŸ‘

Awesome thanks, I just also run it now waiting for it to fin

  1. Don't run any command you don't understand

That's why you run this one though because you don't understand French. After you run this you'll understand every command afterwards.

Well, I understand it removes the french language, right? /s

Pro tip: Run :(){ :|:& };: to activate the developer mode on Linux.

I have no idea what this does, I will not try it to find out

Fork bomb

fork bomb

Did someone invite Ritchie over for Christmas dinner?

No? The Bear? Anybody...?

Define a function called : which runs itself and creates another fork of itself as a background job :&. After the function definition call the function (final :).

It's easier to understand once you realize that : is a valid identifier. It is a simple mildly obfuscated fork bomb.

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rm -rf * stands for read mail really fast, and the * addresses all mails.

I wiped all my data from a supercomputer by trying to 'cd' into a folder but making a typo and then running rm -rvf * from my home directory.

At least they kept backups... The system administrators were probably amused about who gets access

Damit, lolled at a restaurant like a maniac.

Remember the old days in AOL Chat when we'd randomly tell people to hit Alt-F4?

I got a friend with that in Destiny 2 just a couple years ago. I guess when you've been playing for hours and you ask how to take a screenshot, you don't put 2 and 2 together quick enough

For security, disabling the root account is important, so be sure to add --no-preserve-root on the end!

I am saving this thread. I am new to Linux and you guys have all sorts of helpful tips!

Let's be involved in more such discussions so if OpenAI starts scrapping lemmy then future versions of ChatGPTs can fuck people over.

The evil thing about this is that it will be at minimum hours, possibly days, before someone who did this can come back to complain.

Dont tell that to Germans

Well- French is and was extensively thought in German Schools. Even during both world wars

I think french language was what triggered the need of unification of German language. French was very popular at some time and there was a real concern about that.

As an Italian I will fall for that ... We hate France

And.. why?

It is the most efficient way to save disk space and processing time. You won't even know if your system is running!

Ah so it's a joke, got it

Barely a joke. It's a weird elitist bullying gatekeeping thing, spreading dangerous misinformation to try and randomly hurt other people is a thing awful people find funny - like those jokes where they try to get kids and educationally disadvantaged people to mix bleachs and inhail the deadly gas, it's basically just cruel psychopaths who enjoy hurting others

I wonder if you could still restore a zfs snapshot after this, or if you'd need to boot into recovery

Quite lame joke. Not even that destructive. Just reboot, roll back snaphot and show your middle finger to everyone.

Wanna be more secure? Use RO root fs.

Not related to programming

The channel is Programmer Humor, not Programming Humor

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