calango6d ago

Who hasn't typed a risky command? Throw the first stone!

https://programming.dev/post/47295682

Show threaddb06d ago
DOS user detected! In linux you don’t need *.*, you can just use *
Show threadLena6d ago
Maybe he wanted to remove only files with a dot in the name
Show threadjaybone6d ago
And if he’s on / (root) on most common distros, there won’t be any dirs with . (dot) in their name. Unless this matches the dot from the cwd, in which case this is the same as “rm -rf /“? Now I’m curious, I don’t often perform operations on the cwd using dot.
Show threadLena

At least bash doesn’t seem to match it…

gregor@raspberrypi:~ $ ls bridge navidrome seed traefik gregor@raspberrypi:~ $ ls *.* ls: cannot access '*.*': No such file or directory gregor@raspberrypi:~ $ cat *.* cat: '*.*': No such file or directory
Mar 16 at 7:12pmWeb
Show threadjaybone6d ago

Right, so then if asterisk wildcards don’t match on . and … then, in most common distros where there is no dot in any of the top level dirs in /, “rm -rf *.*” in the top level / dir is basically harmless and likely a noop.

So OP is wrong.

Show threadLena6d ago
Technically, it says he’s in the ~ directory, which would usually be /home/god, but even in there there aren’t usually any directories/files with a dot.
Show threadpsud2d ago
~ has many dot directories and files
Show threadLena2d ago
Oh yeah nevermind I’m an idiot