I wanted to delete files and folder recursively from a particular folder so I ran this command from that folder
rm -rf *
I assumed it would delete all files/directories under the current directory recursively. Something bad happened after that (my server is down, not even getting ping response).
Best Answer
Don't forget the possibility that the server being unreachable after the
rm
command had nothing to do with that. It could be a coincidence!Most likely though, the current working directory was not what you thought, when the command was issued.
Were you root when doing this?
This is what happens when issuing the command
rm -rf *
:*
in this case) to all files (including directories, symbolic links and device special files) that matches the used globbing pattern, in this case everything not beginning with a.
Normally, these are sorted "alphabetically" by the shell.exec()
s the first version ofrm
found in your$PATH
, with-rf
as the first argument, and the matched files, one by one as the consecutive arguments.If the
rm
that was invoked was the standardrm
command, it first parses the arguments, one by one, treating all arguments (including ones resulting from shell globbing) that begin with a-
as options until it comes to an argument that does not begin with a-
(except for commands using GNUgetopt()
that accept options after non-options), or one that is exactly--
. Everything after that is considered file names.In other words, if you had a file called (for example)
--no-preserve-root
in the current directory, that would have been interpreted as an option torm
, not as a file name to remove!Be careful with wildcards (and with file naming). If you have a file called
-r
in the current directory, the commandls *
would list the other files in reverse order, and not show the '-r' file.In other words, if you had a file called
--no-preserve-root
, that would have been passed as an option torm
, not as a file name.Use
rm -rf -- *
to prevent that from happening, and also remove the files beginning with-
. Or simply use absolute or relative path names to make the filenames begin with something other than-
, as in:rm ./--flagfile
orrm /abs/path/to/--flagfile
.There is also a
-i
flag torm
that makes it prompt ("interactively") before removing anything.