Years ago - I really don’t remember how many - I swore that XP would be the last version of Windows that I’d run. The day is finally here! It’s 8 April 2014, and support for Windows XP has ended. Sure, you might erase a whole lot of stuff you didn’t want to erase that you may never get back and which may destabilise your system requiring you to reinstall the operating system (and it may happen in as few as two seconds), but what PoorMe claims happened almost certainly didn’t happen. But even if you don’t take that advice, the chances of you erasing every file and directory on your server in the blink of an eye are close to zero. Besides, assuming you’re connecting over SSH, how are you still connected if you deleted everything, including the SSH server?īottom line, don’t run commands on your system that you find on the Internet without first understanding and checking them. Anyone who thinks it takes two seconds has obviously never tried it. Thirdly, even without those errors the process would have taken minutes, if not hours, not “2 seconds”. In fact, I ended up having to delete individual directories off of the root to do what I was trying to achieve, and even then I gave up trying to remove anything but directories I knew contained user data.

Secondly, in my test (which I did run as root) I ran into many files and directories that threw up errors and interrupted the process, even though I used the “-f” flag. First of all, you have to be in the root directory for the dreaded “ rm -rf *” command to try and remove everything (unless you craft the command explicitly to remove everything under the root directory), and you’re almost never in the root directory unless you place yourself there for some specific and very unusual reason. I actually intentionally tried this a few years ago on a server that I was decommissioning. To PoorMe, who claimed to have “just lost all of files and folders on server in just 2 seconds” by running the suggested command, I call bullshit! So, since I had already gone to the trouble of writing my response, and since I don’t post nearly as much to my own blog as I would like, I’ll just post it here instead. I tried to post a comment to that effect on the blog in question, but the comment feature was broken. Today I came across a comment on a blog post related to deleting files on a Unix/Linux system that was a clear case of bullshit.

Zend guard cracked