Le 06/02/2016 17:19, Rainer Weikusat a écrit :
Steve Litt<[email protected]>  writes:
>On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 18:33:44 +0100 Didier Kryn<[email protected]>  wrote:
>
>>      People have always expected rm -rf / to destroy the OS. They
>>also know that, from the keyboard, with root priviledge, they can
>>destroy the partition table of the disk. All this is repairable by
>>the admin her/himself.
>>
>>      The ability to brick the motherboard is brand new.
>
>Not only brand new, but an entirely new level of consequence.
>
>With excellent backups, rm -rf / or even dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 is
>correctable with a few hours of work, on the premises, with only
>resources on the premises.
A somewhat seriously wrong conception about the relation between / (the
root of the filesystem name tree) and /dev/sda1 (some partition of a
mass storage device) seems to exist here.

Sure Rainer, admins with a little of experience know that. This was just a partial enumeration of simple actions able to destroy an installed OS.

You are right to insist on the BIG difference between these two actions and the fact that rm -rf is much more destructive than reformatting /. However, the main danger of rm -rf, up to now, was typically its potential to wipe out /home. None of the pseudofilesystem represented a danger. Experienced people running this command would just unmount any filesystem they would like to preserve and would never have thought of this new, well hidden, danger.

    Didier

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