Date: 28 Oct 2001 17:40:32 -0800 From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: "PetBuilder" <petbuilder@mediaone.net> Cc: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Removing Full Directories Message-ID: <1fwv1ffckv.v1f@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <0110271112442F.96094@chip.wiegand.org> References: <003001c15f0a$39466170$77a44a42@home> <20011027121055.B22280@dan.emsphone.com> <003601c15f0b$e824f660$77a44a42@home> <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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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