The “Thought for 2 seconds” and “Stopped thinking” are hilarious to me
I kinda thought they were in the wrong order, though: “rm -rf ~/“ should have been after “stopped thinking”.
I think it did ‘rm -rf ~/’ and crashed. Hence the ‘stopped thinking’
<NO CARRIER>
At least we know vibe coders will eventually destroy themselves.
just wait until they start vibe coding on their brain implant
I did this once (for real, but without AI assistance)
Reminds me of the time when I bind mounted my home dir in a chroot, then
rm -rf
ed the chroot when I no longer needed it…Reminds me of the company where one of the top brass tried to unmount an important fileshare with rm. That was the day they found out that they didn’t have recent backups of a, shall we say disquieting, amount of important information and people’s work.
Staff started taking their own private backups of important things after that.
Same, I didn’t realize the directory I was deleting had a symlink to some root directory, at least until my mouse stopped working…
Gnome used to have a link to your homedir in its settings directory.
I imagine plenty of people had tons of fun with that. But you need to modify
rm
to follow symlinks nowadays.
I did it recently. Its like watching your computer commit seppuku.
I fairly recently tried to do a
rm match*
but accidentally put a space between thematch
and the*
…
deserved tbh
This is why the first thing I did when my company got us an agentic LLM was set up devcontainer.
Stopped thinking
Never started
We call this a whoopsie daisy.
I often use the phrase “that’s definitely an oopsie. Maybe even an oopsie daisy” at work
Whoopsie daisy-cutter.
OK I’ll bite, how do you get rid of a literal ~ directory?
Should be
\~
in most shells, certainly bash. Usemkdir
andrmdir
when messing around to prevent accidents.Saw this post this morning and was thinking about how to delete it ( while falling back asleep ). Escaping the ~, ofc that’d work! I feel so stupid now haha
rmdir ./~
Just give rm the entire path or a relative path like ./~
prefix with path, and/or quotation
Using Nautilus or Dolphin.
True if these are installed, but if I’m on a server’s command line they probably aren’t.
A method not yet mentioned is by inode, (I’ve accidentally created filenames I didn’t know how to escape at the time like
--
or other command line flags/special characters)ls -li
Once you get the inode
find . -type f -inum $inode -delete
rm -rf “~” may work?
No, but single quotes will.
huh, I almost removed my entire home directory
In case you are just testing it out, don’t use
-rf
Your~
directory is most probably empty, so userm -d
instead, to prevent all footguns in case you put the wrong character in the end.-d, --dir remove empty directories
I feel safe doing
rm -d /
.
I feel safe doingsudo rm -d /
.Because it won’t delete anything that has a file in it.
deleted by creator
In these touchy cases always add ‘-i’ to have a confirmation when doing dangerous things. This will save your ass.
I think it should’ve started with “stopped thinking”
It should have done sudo rm -rf /*
For when you want to delete everything in the root directory, but absolutely need to keep the directory itself.
Of course :3
So. Funny story. Back when I was incredibly new to Linux, I was trying to move everything from my downloads folder to somewhere else. So I navigated into the downloads directory on the command line and sent something like
“sudo mv /* ~/misc”
when I meant to type
“sudo mv ./* ~/misc”
Yea… That was a fun learning experience and hilarious way to utterly fuck everything on that machine. Luckily it was just an old laptop I’d installed Linux on to mess around and learn, no real damage done
ctrl-z… ctrl-z…CTRL-Z
You can definitely do this redirecting output. I did this to myself and sighed about 2 seconds into it after realizing what I had done.
Creating a ~ folder isn’t the tricky part. Removing it is.
(until you figure it out once)
I mean I have to wipe out my
~
relatively frequently on some machines at times but that’s for “actual” “reasons”, LLM hallucinations not involvedIs this assisted
suicide?Same energy as Republican memes