[GTALUG] Man deletes his entire company

[Scott Sullivan]

On 04/15/2016 04:23 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 12:47:49PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
>> About "rm -rf", the article says:
>>
>> 	The code usually deleted specific parts of a server or
>> 	computer, but because this code didn't have a specified
>> 	target, it deleted everything.
>>
>> This isn't true of the rm(1) command.  No operand means delete nothing.
>>
>> The story does not ring true for other reasons.  But it could be.
>
> It is written wrong.  Elsewhere it explained that it was rm -rf
> ${foo}/${bar} with both environment variables empty which hence means
> rm -rf /
>
> So yes, far from empty arguments to rm.  Empty environment variables.
>


Reading through the thread, I've seen no mention,

--preserve-root
               do not remove '/'

In modern RHEL/CentOS 7 it's actually on by default.

-- 
Scott Sullivan