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To: "PetBuilder" <petbuilder@mediaone.net>
Cc: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject: Re: Removing Full Directories
References: <003001c15f0a$39466170$77a44a42@home>
	<20011027121055.B22280@dan.emsphone.com>
	<003601c15f0b$e824f660$77a44a42@home>
	<0110271112442F.96094@chip.wiegand.org>
From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen)
Date: 28 Oct 2001 17:40:32 -0800
In-Reply-To: <0110271112442F.96094@chip.wiegand.org>
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Chip <chip@wiegand.org> writes:

> A word of warning: be VERY careful with rm -rf, if you mistakenly remove the 
> wrong directory, any directory including all the root directories - its GONE, 
> say bye-bye to whatever was there.

Slightly less dangerous is "\rm -r" (in sh-family shells the slash just
causes it to ignore any alias like "rm -i").

Some Unix OSes allow the superuser to use the "unlink" command to very
quickly remove even very large directories, but I see that this has been
removed from FreeBSD.  (It leaves the filesystem in "need" of a "fsck".)

P.S. Red Hat Linux (at one time, at least) had special behavior if you
tried to delete "/".  It probably just gave special warning -- I forget.

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