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Comment by nvartolomei | Hacker News Reader

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nvartolomei

Try this: yes 'c=(╱ ╲);printf ${c[RANDOM%2]}'|bash

It doesn't do any harm, promise.

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Video of what it does (BASIC version): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9joBLOZVEo

For doing it without using yes,

    while [[ 1 ]]; do c=(╱ ╲);printf ${c[RANDOM%2]}; done

It's a cheesy maze generator.

    tr '\000-\377' '[/*128]\\' </dev/urandom

That's pretty awesome! (For the sceptics, it indeed does no harm and can be interrupted at will)

Haha, good one. Here's another harmless command you can try. It's fun!

sudo rm -rf /

I wouldn't joke with that.. Someone may actually try and lose a lot of time and data. Yes, most HN readers will get your 'joke', but possibly not all.

Its atleast disabled by default in latest versions of Ubuntu and other distros, but regardless paul_f shouldn't have posted it without any disclaimer.

It'd teach them not to run random commands they found on the internet, what rm does, and to make backups. Three valueable lessons.
That is, if it would actually work: modern rm implementations have a special case for /. Read the manpage and/or try this instead:
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

If you blindly run code you find on the Internet without understanding what it does, you deserve all you get.

In case anyone didn't know, this command would recursively remove all files and directories on the entire filesystem.

No it [most likely] wouldn't. Read the manpage.

To clarify to anyone not fammilar with rm, running `rm /` is such a stupid thing to do, that rm has a special case where if won't let you delete "/". To override this behavior, you need the flag "--no-preserve-root".

> and can be interrupted at will
Unless you're running tmux, obviously...

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