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0 pointsteekert8y ago0 comments

Haha, tried that a couple of months back before wanting to do a reinstall. The system stopped me with some warning :) I think it was Arch but could have been Ubuntu or Solus.

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2 comments · 2 top-level

Gloire_a_Satan8y ago

There's a way to still do the rm -rf / bypassing the warning but you shouldn't do that.

Ever since systemd was a thing, that command has stopped being 'safe'. It no longers solely affect the filesystem. It can wipe your EFI variables and make your comnputer unable to boot at all, even unable to boot installers to reinstall linux.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402

Don't think of the file system as just the file system. If you keep thinking of / as only meaning 'whatever's in that hard drive' you will not like what you may encounter.

p7IDD2438y ago

Yep, nowadays rm has a failsafe and requires you to add --no-preserve-root argument if you want to force remove the root folder recursively.

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