10 Most Dangerous Commands – You Should Never Execute on Linux

Linux command line is productive, useful and interesting but sometimes it may be very much dangerous specially when you are not sure what you are doing. This article is not intended to make you furious of Linux or Linux command line. We just want to make you aware of some of the commands which you should think twice before you execute them.

10 Dangerous Linux Commands

1. rm -rf Command

The rm -rf command is one of the fastest way to delete a folder and its contents. But a little typo or ignorance may result into unrecoverable system damage. The some of options used with rm command are.

1. rm command in Linux is used to delete files.
2. rm -r command deletes the folder recursively, even the empty folder.
3. rm -f command removes ‘Read only File’ without asking.
4. rm -rf / : Force deletion of everything in root directory.
5. rm -rf * : Force deletion of everything in current directory/working directory.
6. rm -rf . : Force deletion of current folder and sub folders.

Hence, be careful when you are executing rm -rf command. To overcome accidental delete of file by ‘rm‘ command, create an alias of ‘rm‘ command as ‘rm -i‘ in “.bashrc” file, it will ask you to confirm every deletion.

2. :(){:|:&};: Command

The above is actually a fork bomb. It operates by defining a function called ‘:‘, which calls itself twice, once in the foreground and once in the background. It keeps on executing again and again till the system freezes.

:(){:|:&};:

3. command > /dev/sda

The above command writes the output of ‘command‘ on the block /dev/sda. The above command writes raw data and all the files on the block will be replaced with raw data, thus resulting in total loss of data on the block.

4. mv folder /dev/null

The above command will move ‘folder‘ to /dev/null. In Linux /dev/null or null device is a special file that discards all the data written to it and reports that write operation succeed.

# mv /home/user/* /dev/null

The above command will move all the contents of a User directory to /dev/null, which literally means everything there was sent to blackhole (null).

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