Re: [CentOS] In A UEFI World, "rm -rf /" Can Brick Your System

On 02/01/2016 11:54 AM, Frank Cox wrote:

On Mon, 1 Feb 2016 13:44:48 -0600 Chris Adams wrote:

...

Did someone think running "rm -rf /" is a good idea?

Quote from one of the people who commented on that article:

QUOTE:

You have this in a script: rm -rf "${DIRECTORY}"/

Now, you have a bug in the script and ${DIRECTORY} is not initialized. You then get rm -rf / executed. One should always ensure that DIRECTORY is not empty before running this. Or better, never end with /. If you have rm -rf "${DIRECTORY}", then only rm -rf gets executed, causing rm to fail since no file/directory is provided. END OF QUOTE

Yeah, that can happen, but I remember being taught that was an extremely bad scripting practice back in 1998 when I took my first Linux class.