[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