if you want know what it would do, run "rm -ri /" and it will ask for confirmation before deleting.

Instead of a smiley you could at least provide some info on that. This command will likely be destroying the current shell, as it displays the content of every regular file in the system, regardless of it being a text file or a binary one. And the first binary cat'ed to the terminal will crash the display.

But here's another nice one, giving you a complete list of all regular files on the system along with some meta data (size, modification time, owner):

This might be run as user as well as from a root shell. While run as normal user you will get a bunch of errors as you are not allowed to inspect some system files.

You're absolutely right that it's a 'mean' thing to tell a 'noob' to do without some kind of warning, but honestly... you thought it was a 'real cool command line tweak'? To do what, exactly?

No description of its effects was even given in the original post, so if you ran it without having some idea of what it was going to do, you have only yourself to blame at that point.

I know maybe that sounds harsh, but XTerm isn't a place where you want to just go randomly entering commands without understanding what they do. Bad things can happen.

Virtual machine with disks set for changes not to persist?

Live CD?

Live CD booted to RAM?

No recovering needed.

OP here...


Someone might as well close this thread. I dunno what to say other than I'm disappointed and very discouraged...

I was hesitant to even try what was claimed to be the 'disk usage' command... I guess I'm glad I didn't get screwed over on that one. Thank you, whoever posted it...

Did you actually read your whole thread?

There's only one command listed (rm -rf) that will get you into any trouble, and I'm certain qwerty never actually wanted or expected anyone to go skipping off and run it. That's an old joke.


Interest in whether or not there's protection in place for that command is also completely valid. Besides that, I can't think of a single worse command for a 'noob' to run, so it seems to me like its a good thing someone brought it up in here.. part of learning about the 'dos' of XTerm should definitely be learning the 'don'ts', since you can definitely cause some havoc in short time (BIG don't: don't run anything unless you know what it's going to do).

..granted discussion of that dominates the replies currently, and you didn't get a ton of other useful feedback, but I'm not sure that's any reason to be discouraged -- you did set out to learn something about terminal after all.

(FWIW, ifconfig is perfectly safe)

For a noob, I'd recommend starting with reading something like http://freeengineer.org/learnUNIXin10minutes.html - that way you'll have at least half a chance of understanding what all the other "cool" commands actually do.

qwerty12 is one of the heroes of this site. Several of the best people here are showing signs of strain, probably because of overwork. Sorry about that.

I am not laughing..

Cant see the fun in giving that advise in a thread like this

Nerd bullying on a forum FTL.