Spake Joey Dale on Sunday, February 29, 2004 at 10:27PM -0500:
> Hear is a nother question. Everyone jokes about rm -rf / as root but
> what would happen, (I know what the commad would do) what would happen
> when it got to /bin/coreutils and removed rm?
>
Well, rm would continue on merrily deleting everything, including
itself. It deletes itself from the harddrive, but it is still running
in memory.
You can test this, without hosing your system, too! :)
--- suicide.c ---
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
/* print a message to the user */
printf("I, %s, shall unlink myself now.\n", argv[0]);
/* remove thyself! */
unlink("suicide");
/* Say goodbye */
puts("Goodbye, cruel world.");
exit(0);
}
--- end ---
now, if you put that in a file called
suicide.c, and run gcc -o suicide suicide.c,
run ./suicide and it'll remove itself.
--- % gcc -o suicide suicide.c% ls suicide suicide*
% ./suicide I, ./suicide, shall unlink myself now. Goodbye, cruel world ---
Oh, and a similar thing happens when you remove libraries a program needs... the programs will still run. I know this because once I rm -rf'ed /lib by accident... yes, they'll run, but nothing will start...
This is why rm is to be respected. <grin>
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