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A Linux user's nightmare: the machine was wiped clean with one click
(www.mikrobitti.fi)
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.
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The command was rm -rf $pathvariable
Bug in the code caused the path to be root. Wasn't explicitly malicious
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.it apparently was defaulting to the home dir, not
/
Oh, oof.
Hopefully most people take regular snapshots.
Yes,
rm -rf --allow-unsafe
Or something is required
--no-preserve-root