[central_va]

Always change directory to root ‘/’ before running rm -rf. Make sure you have su - root first. Now you are talking unix.

[not in the club]

And don’t forget to give everyone you hire, including interns, access to your production servers on day 1

[lefty-lie-spy]

Exactly. This is how I maintain all my systems too. It’s standard operating procedure for all IT engineers and we teach it to all new joiners on day one.

[NorthMountain]

Always change directory to root ‘/’ before running rm -rf.

I did that once ("rm -rvf *"), deliberately, on an SGI workstation that was

(1) disconnected from our LAN and
(2) being decommissioned

It stayed "up" for several minutes before some critical files got deleted (things in "/dev", IIRC) and the display went blank. Continued to chatter the disk for several more minutes before it totally quit doing anything.

I felt like Dave Bowman ...