[raverbashing]

I don't remember how it is on the newer versions, but try using fdisk in an old linux distro and see how many confirmations you get when deleting a partition.

Or just the old rm -rf /

Older stuff asks for much less confirmations.

[taylorbuley]

No thanks. It makes me shudder to just see this printed in the comments section!

[grecy]

I was leaving my old job and handing in my MacBook Pro. After getting permission from the network guys (who were going to format it anyway) I ran rm -rf / as root.

It was surprisingly boring, taking a very long time to delete all my files (I should have deleted them first). Eventually it got around to deleting fonts, which caused things to render a little strange, but after 60 minutes nothing much had changed and it was still chugging, so we shut it down and went to the bar for my last "Friday night drinks".

[yoblin]

I did the same thing but had remotely SSH mounted some of our production servers.

Won't make that mistake again.

[gordjw]

I managed to run (sudo) mv /* /tmp one day.

I was trying to move everything out of a folder to tmp (mv ./* /tmp), which was fine. Then I cd to /, and, wanting to rerun the command I'd run right before the mv, pressed up twice and enter quickly...

Well, it failed once it finished moving /bin/mv to tmp. Of course cp, and a lot of other helpful commands come before mv alphabetically.

It wasn't too bad, just needed a boot from a live disc to move everything back, but I still get nervous whenever / and * are in the same command.

[MBCook]

I did it to one of my linux boxes once, but caught it before it got everything.

It made for a very trippy and insightful experience. Commands that had already been run (like cp, ls, mv, cd, etc.) worked fine since they were in memory but other ones wouldn't run (/bin was one of the first to go).

I tried for about an hour to bootstrap the system back to normal by copying files of CD/etc but in the end the damage was too bad for my (very amateur) experience and I ended up reinstalling.

[alxndr]

Some fun exploration of a `rm -rf`'d system: http://lambdaops.com/rm-rf-remains

discussed here last month https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7892247

[jqm]

It's still the same on some Linux distros at least. I wiped a Slackware install last year carelessly attempting to fdisk an external drive. I caught it a few moments in, but it took a bit of doing to get the data back and I had to re-install.

[sliverstorm]

Function first, failsafes second. Or fifth. Or twentieth.

[nisa]

`parted` always makes me nervous. It's probably not so bad but the changes are instant.