Should only be used with extreme caution and if you know what you are doing.
Ok. What is the actual use case for “rm -rf /“ even if you know what you are doing and using extreme caution? If you want to wipe a disk, there are better ways to do it, and you certainly wouldn’t want that disk mounted on / when you do it, right?
None. Remember that the response is AI generated. It’s probabilistically created from people’s writings. There are strong relations between that command and other ‘dangerous commands.’ Writings about 'dangerous commands ’ oft contain something about how they should ‘only be run by someone who knows what they are doing’ so the response does too.
No, -r and -f are two different switches. -r is recursive, used so that it also removes folders within the directory. -f is force (so overriding all confirmations, etc).
Great. It’s learned how to be snarky.
Ok. What is the actual use case for “rm -rf /“ even if you know what you are doing and using extreme caution? If you want to wipe a disk, there are better ways to do it, and you certainly wouldn’t want that disk mounted on / when you do it, right?
None. Remember that the response is AI generated. It’s probabilistically created from people’s writings. There are strong relations between that command and other ‘dangerous commands.’ Writings about 'dangerous commands ’ oft contain something about how they should ‘only be run by someone who knows what they are doing’ so the response does too.
isn’t the command meant to be used on a certain path? like if you just graduated high school, you can just run “rm -rf ~/documents/homework/” ?
Correct me if im wrong, i assume switch “-rf” is short for “Root File”, for the starting point of recursion
No, -r and -f are two different switches. -r is recursive, used so that it also removes folders within the directory. -f is force (so overriding all confirmations, etc).
TIL
It’s two switches. The f makes the operation forced. And the r makes the operation recursive.