this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
105 points (88.9% liked)

Linux

48376 readers
1770 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] carzian@lemmy.ml 44 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

The command was rm -rf $pathvariable

Bug in the code caused the path to be root. Wasn't explicitly malicious

[–] dandroid@sh.itjust.works 19 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Don't most distros have safeguards against this? I tried sudo rm -rf / in an Ubuntu VM that I was about to delete just to see what happened, and it gave me a warning. I had to add some other option to bypass the warning.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

it apparently was defaulting to the home dir, not /

[–] dandroid@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 months ago

Oh, oof.

Hopefully most people take regular snapshots.

[–] tfowinder@lemmy.ml 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yes,

rm -rf --allow-unsafe

Or something is required

[–] Rustmilian@lemmy.world 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

--no-preserve-root