rm -rf / horror stories

Someone asked Quora community to share the craziest “rm -rf /” stories.   There are quite a few good ones, including this video from Pixar about Toy Story 2 almost not happening.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL_g0tyaIeE]

5 thoughts on “rm -rf / horror stories”


  1. I tried
    ls -lrt | grep “Apr 10″| grep -v “important filename”
    and got required list of files and directories which I wanted to remove.

    And then I did this:
    ls -lrt | grep “Apr 10″| grep -v “important filename” | rm -rf *

    POOF!

    Everything, everything was gone under current directory.

    What just happened here?!


    1. Hehe … yup, happened to me a couple of times as well. Sending it to “|xargs rm -rf” is a better option of course. But even then, it’s a dangerous way of removing files. Especially if you have files and folders with special symbols, like spaces, quotes, and asterisks. :)

Leave a Comment