Adieu!
this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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I fell for a similar (but less) obvious joke on my first Linux installation back in 1995. That one used dd instead of rm. I lost a lot of code that I had written. After that, I've failed to see the humor in this kind of joke. There's always the risk that someone new doesn't understand it's a joke, and tries it out.
Some folks have to learn the hard way.
- Don't type in code from the internet that you don't understand.
- Always have a backup.
- Sometimes you're going to bork your system. Know when to reinstall, restore and move on.
I prefer the less harmful "alt+F4" joke, though most people know what that one does by now.
Yeah, it helps freeing RAM and making your pc go faster
It happened in this very post, actually. Serves them right for French bashing.
The rest of the time, I'd agree with you, I've never done this joke nor condone it.
I agree. The / directory may receive special considerations, and it may be extra protected, but once I was doing something with rm -r and ../* in some folder inside my home directory... it wasn't fun.
J’aimerais vous interrompre pour un moment. Ce que vous appelez Linux est, en réalité, GNU/Linux ou, comme je me suis mis·e à l’appeler récemment, GNU plus Linux. Linux n’est pas un système d’exploitation en soi, mais plutôt un autre composant libre d’un système GNU pleinement fonctionnel rendu utile par les librairies GNU, les utilitaires du shell et les composantes systèmes vitales, formant un système d’exploitation complet tel que défini par POSIX.
Plusieurs ordinateurs utilisent chaque jour une version modifiée du système GNU, sans s’en rendre compte. A travers une tournure particulière des événements, la version de GNU qui est largement utilisée aujourd’hui est souvent appelée Linux, et plusieurs de ses utilisateur·ices ne sont pas au courant qu’il s’agit pratiquement du système GNU, développé par le projet GNU.
Linux existe vraiment, et ces gens s’en servent, mais c’est juste une partie du système qu’iels utilisent. Linux est le noyau; le programme dans le système qui alloue les ressources de la machine aux autres programmes que vous exécutez. Le noyau est essentiel au système d’exploitation, mais inutile par lui-même; il ne peut fonctionner que dans le contexte d’un système d’exploitation complet. Linux est normalement utilisé en combinaison avec le système d’exploitation GNU: le système au complet est pratiquement GNU avec Linux ajouté, ou GNU/Linux. Et toutes les soi-disant distributions Linux sont en réalité des distributions de GNU/Linux!
- Richard M. Sgrandhomme (probablement)
"Sgrandhomme" was jarring enough to get me to go look up the etymology of Stallman, and it's apparently nothing to do with men and more to do with the mouth (myn) of a stream (stæl).
Unfortunately, «(De l')embouchure du ruisseau» is a bit long for a surname, French or otherwise. I could see abbreviated variants of that mistakenly turning into "Rousseau", "Lambert" and "Dubois", if not others, but "Ruisseau" itself could work. There's apparently a book called "Monsieur Ruisseau", but I get the impression that it's not a common surname in French (a bit like how "Stream" isn't in English), and also, it completely ignores the -man part of the name.
Going another direction gives "Crique", but in modern French that means "cove" which isn't quite the right meaning, and also doesn't seem to be a surname.
Yet another direction takes "Stallman" to mean "shopkeeper", and from that we might get "Marchand" or a variant, which is definitely a French surname.
ooh, that’s interesting! thank you for sharing
honestly, i didn’t really put much effort into it, it was part of the joke that the translation would be botched (originally, i wanted to translate "stall" directly, and came up with two plausible translations: "stalle", which would be pretty boring (no pun intended), and "retarder", which nope nope nope nope, french is my first language, i know that means something else in french, but i am NOT using that)
i love Linux tips! you can also print animated clams on the CLI with :(){ :|:& };: add to your bashrc to be greeted everytime you open a terminal!
but seriously, don't run that unless you want to reboot.
Thanks to modern linux environment I didn't even need to reboot, after 3 minutes it just stopped. It's strange that I could use all my programs except htop and ps...
Something-something trees are an invasive species so add --no-preserve-root
Have you ever tasted Root preserves? It's awful it tastes like wood, no sugar. I always enter --no-preserve-root. A little bit ruin's the whole batch.
You're deleting everything but root, so not needed.
Anything but root and hidden elements directly below root.
You need to add --no-preserve-root as it means "no, preserve root(language)"
If you're dumb enough to hate the French, you deserve what's about to happen to you.
I don't hate the french I just gotta free up some space by deleting the language pack :(
This frees up all space.
Even better!
fr!
French is bloat 👍
Language pack du fromage
Et le baguette.
Feel free to remove the language pack then, I suppose.
(You'll lose 50% of the English vocabulary, btw)
I've never been so wrong.
Me
OMG YOU ACTUALLY DID IT XDDDDDDDDDD
You gotta eat a baguette sandwich with the French cheese of your choice, with a side of French red wine as penance.
Mon Dieu, qui voudrait supprimer le pack de langue française ?
You are not funny. Your parents are not funny. Your grand parents were not funny. In fact, you have a long standing ancestry of non funny bastards.
What does it actually do?
These are unix/linux terminal actions.
'sudo' controls access rights, so it's effectively like Windows admin rights. People typically wouldn't be allowed to use sudo unless they own the system or are some kind of system administrator (like in a workplace).
The 'rm' is the remove function, or deleting files or folders.
'-rf' are two options you can specify with the 'rm' part. The '-r' part means recursive, and effectively confirms that you do in fact want to delete a directory (folder). Normally rm would not, and rmdir I think only works on empty directories. The '-f' option forces removal of all items without any prompts for confirmation for individual items found for removal.
Then the '/*' is the file and or directory path you want to remove. In this case it's the top of the system. The entire statement is essentially a joke about a full delete of your computer.
So kinda like the delete System32 joke but more nuclear?
in Windows your separate each drive by a letter like C:, D:, etc, however on Linux your drives are mounted as part of your folder structure. the top level is called root which would be / you can then mount each disc directly as a folder under root, so for example /home could be a separate hard drive but it's still mounted under root, note the starting slash. This means the command deletes any and all files+directories under root, this can include mounted USB, mounted network drives and anything mounted to your root. your basically nuking all the files you can access when you're logged in as admin.
Also windows locks files that are in use, so attempting to delete system32 would (probably, I've never tried it) give some errors because it's using a bunch of those files already and would leave those files intact even if you're very determined to get rid of them. This is why you need to reboot to apply many updates because even the updater can't get around that restriction.
It's handled differently on Linux. I'm not 100% on the specifics of the implementation but it either loads files in use entirely into RAM or simply removes the reference to the file when deleted (or makes a new file and points the reference there if you're replacing the file). That means anything that is currently using the file can continue to do so after a delete/overwrite, so the OS doesn't prevent it from happening. This is why you can run any updates without restarting on Linux (though you do need to restart to get the system to use some updates, if they update critical components that can't be restarted independently of the rest of the system, like the kernel).
If you want to nuke your whole os install drive on windows, you need to boot into a different OS instance (which is what the repair partition is, just a barebones windows install that can access files on the main install without the locking). But Linux can do it from within the same instance.
If it were on an old installation of linux, it would delete everything on the file system, from every disk attached.
Modern Linux systems require an additional flag to explicitly stay that you want to nuke your system.
Modern Linux systems require an additional flag to explicitly stay that you want to nuke your system.
Are you sure?
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Looks like it started appearing in various flavors of Unix and Linux around 2005.
but here they use /* as the target, so they are not telling rm to delete the root directory.
You are right, but I'm not sure if the intelligence was built into the command to recognize it as a root level deletion.
Eats itself inside out
Love all the people angry at this in the comments since you KNOW they fell for it before.
Mais pourquoi vouloir supprimer le paquet linguistique français ?
I assume this comment is in French since all I see is a blank comment, because I have deleted the bloat language pack.
Thanks Linux tech tips!
I always remove the Bri*ish English pack.
🤮🤮🤮