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And we could come up with a million other different ways to wreck a un*x system. The only rule is not to run a command you don't understand, especially if it comes from an untrusted source.

Also, most of those commands won't hurt much if they're not run as root (except the forkbomb and the recursive chmod/rm, and rm won't let you do that by default). If you run untrusted commands as root you deserve what happens to you.

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^That.

A simple rule of thumb is: don't run any commands you don't understand before looking up a few descriptions of what it means (or use man pages).

Number 2, for example, is just a bunch of shellcode, and unless you do penetration testing for a living, you probably can't directly see what it'd do. This goes not only for this particular script, but for mostly every piece of shellcode that can be written. (And make no mistake, there are a frapillion ways in which a piece of shellcode can utterly destroy your computer.) Ergo: don't run them if you don't get them.

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