Don’t run this command unless you want to delete all the files on your system and break Linux on your system.
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
So what you’re saying is, it is true that I will no longer have French installed.
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.
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 🙃
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.
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.
https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install
Why is it the canon way to install rust by piping curl output to sh???
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 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.
It’ll be a good learning experience for anyone who runs commands seen on this community.
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 /
I have checked this and can confirm that after entering this command, there is no more French in the system. 👍
- 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.
