A little more destructive 😅
“As a ‘super user’, do ‘remove’ with ‘force’ and ‘recursively’ everything starting from the beginning of the hard drive (‘/‘)
Though I think most consumer Linux OS has like 2-3 warnings before actually doing it……… doesn’t stop everybody 😅
Im not sure if it would delete the whole system. Isn’t it more likely that it will destroy everything until it kills a file/directory necessary for the operation to run?
Thats rough. Good to know. Also one reason why I ever only connect to storage when I need it and dismount when I don’t and don’t save the credentials (and have another backup off site).
Before throwing away an old laptop, I had it do that to itself. Well, more specifically I used shred, which doesn’t just mark files as ‘deleted’, but also actively overwrites the bytes on disk.
I started it from a TTY, so that there was no GUI that could want to load files from disk and then potentially crash the whole operation. But yeah, it just went through like normal and I ended up back on my shell (which makes sense, the shell should be in RAM).
It was only when I ran exit to close that shell, that the system showed it was irreparably broken.
I did then also take out the hard drive to whack it with a hammer, just to be sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A lot of Linux distros load most system required processes into memory, which is why you can update while using the system. This would also allow you to (probably) delete everything.
It would delete all files, but if you happen to be running a distro configured to run from a RAM disk after boot then it won’t actually immediately halt (see almost every single liveCD Linux environment)
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A little more destructive 😅
“As a ‘super user’, do ‘remove’ with ‘force’ and ‘recursively’ everything starting from the beginning of the hard drive (‘/‘)
Though I think most consumer Linux OS has like 2-3 warnings before actually doing it……… doesn’t stop everybody 😅
In Linux, the root of the filesystem is /
The command would remove recursively every file/directory in the filesystem, essentially nuking the whole system.
Im not sure if it would delete the whole system. Isn’t it more likely that it will destroy everything until it kills a file/directory necessary for the operation to run?
Its running in ram so no, it would destroy everything.
What’s worse is if you have any storage mounted. I’ve known people who wiped there backups
Thats rough. Good to know. Also one reason why I ever only connect to storage when I need it and dismount when I don’t and don’t save the credentials (and have another backup off site).
Before throwing away an old laptop, I had it do that to itself. Well, more specifically I used
shred, which doesn’t just mark files as ‘deleted’, but also actively overwrites the bytes on disk.I started it from a TTY, so that there was no GUI that could want to load files from disk and then potentially crash the whole operation. But yeah, it just went through like normal and I ended up back on my shell (which makes sense, the shell should be in RAM).
It was only when I ran
exitto close that shell, that the system showed it was irreparably broken.I did then also take out the hard drive to whack it with a hammer, just to be sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There is no way mom would ever see my pron folder!
A lot of Linux distros load most system required processes into memory, which is why you can update while using the system. This would also allow you to (probably) delete everything.
Well, maybe. My explanation was an oversimplification.
You can always try it and see for yourself (in a VM of course).
It would delete all files, but if you happen to be running a distro configured to run from a RAM disk after boot then it won’t actually immediately halt (see almost every single liveCD Linux environment)
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