Help! I just rm -rf /

chicken

chicken

Active member
and thanks to my fast computer I lost basically everything before I could stop it. From some random luck (probably a permission error) It saved my last iphoto backup, which I had not moved off my computer yet.

Either way. I'm throwing my photos onto a usb stick. I got my school stuff in a dropbox and I did a full backup of less important things (music, videos, games, etc) a couple of months ago.

my question is. Will it fuck up once I reset my computer? am I going to have to do a full OS install again? you hear about these things but you never think you would be dumb enough to do it.
 
Yup. Totally nuked my computer. Lucky I got everything that wasn't delted off before I restarted. Totally formatted my drive and have osx reinstalling. FML.
 
seriously though. Learn from my stupidity. If you ever want to delete a directory and its contents and you need root privileges to do it, you should at the very least change out of the root directory into its parent directory before you even think about typing in sudo rm -rf folder_name

yes, I realize that even doing what I said is lazy, but people will always be lazy, at least on their personal computers. However don't be even lazier and type that in from your root directory with the path to the folder. one cd could save you a lot of time.
 
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