Now I'm totally interested to know what you ran... running that on an N900 would be awesome just to see if it works....

It didn't give any output at all? Did you have to CTRL+C to get back to a prompt or did it just go to a prompt? Did you run "sudo gainroot" first?

(I'm certainly not recommending anyone do it that doesn't know what their doing and how to reflash (and have backups))

Recent implementations of rf tend to be smart about rm -rf / and anything like that... if it involves /

But rm -rf /etc /usr /home /bin /sbin /lib

Will work

Also some shells like zsh have an option to always catch the rm -rf * or / and will ask if you really really want do run this.

Go back a page.. /* is so much easier than spelling it out!

But on Ubuntu rm -rf / actually *told* you "Sorry.. won't do that." Timwatt said it did *nothing*.. that's curious.

this tread should be terminated!

I did not run gain root, I would have given it a little though before trying that, just restarted my n900 and I all looks good.

All I can say is I am glad this is not a biology class... i find this morbid fascination with destroying "noob's" n900 rather sick.

http://wiki.maemo.org/General_precautions

You misunderstand me. I said "Harsh" to qwerty because that's the first time, on these forums, (or rather anywhere that's supposed to be helpful) that I have seen that joke said without an actual warning, note, kill your kitten clause, etc.

I'm sorry my post didn't make that clear enough when I was telling him he was being "harsh" for responding to a "noob" with that. I was somewhat of the hope that that *would* give someone pause.

No where have I ever recommended anyone try that without telling them I hope they don't want their device back after running it...

The "morbid fascination" of mine came when someone showed me that the rm command wants to try and be "smart" and stop people from doing that now. So I tested it. And I posted my results for everyone to see... making it very clear what I expected to see and what I got.

But since you said you ran the original on an actual device.. that certainly peaks my interest to see if it actually worked.

If I had an N900 (see sig: come on people buy me one ) I would certainly try it just to see if the rm on the N900 is one of the ones that try and "protect" noobs from such negative advice.

Not with recent gnu coreutils rm it catches it. :) even catches ./ and other such ideas... :)

browse through your file system with: "find / -type f -exec cat {} \;"
8)

I'm not 100% positive but I think /bin/rm is linked to busybox on the n900 (can't check atm); its behavior may not match GNU's core/file utils.

So (this goes without saying) don't tempt fate with an rm -rf /.

It's entirely possible that it would traverse the filesystem even as user (if not running under sudo) and wipe out the files in your home directory, even if not bricking the device.

Back on the subject of evil.. what about a forkbomb?

perl -e 'while (1) { fork (); }'

Won't brick your device, but will lock it up immediately (even as a user). Beware.

Hrm.. ok well it works with:

I rather like my Karmic Desktop just the way it is so I won't be trying it on that one . It's version is 7.4 though. So obviously the SDK is a bit outdated.