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Some people just want to watch the world burn, one alias at a time
CLI Post #2152 · source on Telegram

Some people just want to watch the world burn, one alias at a time

Description

This meme uses the iconic 'Disaster Girl' format, which shows a young girl smirking mischievously at the camera while a house burns in the background. Superimposed over the image is a black bar containing the text of a shell command: '$ alias cd='rm -rf''. The humor lies in the deeply malicious nature of this command. It creates an alias that overwrites the common and harmless 'cd' (change directory) command, used for navigating the file system, with the extremely destructive 'rm -rf' command, which forcefully and recursively deletes files and directories without confirmation. The implication is that the smirking girl has set this trap on someone's computer, knowing that the next time they try to navigate to a directory, they will instead irrevocably delete it. For developers and system administrators, this represents a simple but catastrophic act of sabotage, a classic 'do not try this at home' joke that plays on the power and danger of the command line

Categories

CLI Security OperatingSystems DevCommunities

Common Tags

CLI CommandLineInterface CLITools BashScripting ShellScriptingLanguages UnixCommands DataLoss DeveloperHumor Sysadmin

Comments

28
Anonymous ★ Top Pick This is the 'hello world' of a toxic workplace. The senior dev version is aliasing 'git pull' to 'git reset --hard origin/main && git clean -fdx'
  1. Anonymous ★ Top Pick

    This is the 'hello world' of a toxic workplace. The senior dev version is aliasing 'git pull' to 'git reset --hard origin/main && git clean -fdx'

  2. Anonymous

    Congrats, you’ve built the ultimate zero-state deployment: alias cd='rm -rf' - instant immutability, negative tech debt, and a brand-new line on your résumé

  3. Anonymous

    The real disaster is when you realize your muscle memory types 'cd /' faster than your brain can process what you actually aliased it to, and suddenly your entire filesystem becomes as ephemeral as that junior developer's confidence after their first code review

  4. Anonymous

    This is the shell alias equivalent of replacing your building's fire alarm with a flamethrower trigger. Every innocent 'cd /home' becomes an existential threat to your entire filesystem. It's the kind of configuration that makes you understand why production servers have change management processes, and why that junior dev who 'just wanted to make navigation faster' is now updating their LinkedIn profile. The real horror isn't the first time you run it - it's realizing your .bashrc has been synced across all your servers via your dotfiles repo

  5. Anonymous

    Alias cd='rm -rf' - the most aggressive take on immutable infrastructure: every directory is ephemeral on entry

  6. Anonymous

    Senior dev hack: alias cd to rm -rf for that instant 'fresh start' - because refactoring the universe is overrated

  7. Anonymous

    alias cd='rm -rf' is chaos engineering for your homedir - RPO, monitoring, and your résumé all get exercised in one keystroke

  8. @pyproman 5y

    Correct: alias cd='rm -rf --no-preserve-root'

    1. @doorhinge 5y

      what does that flag do

      1. @freeapp2014 5y

        It allows to operate on /

        1. @doorhinge 5y

          oh nice

        2. Deleted Account 5y

          you cant use it on root folder without that flag?

          1. @freeapp2014 5y

            It will say something like “rm: it is not safe to operate recursively on /“

    2. Deleted Account 5y

      But it errors if you cd with no args

      1. @freeapp2014 5y

        Hmmm

      2. Deleted Account 5y

        alias cd='rm -rf * '

        1. Deleted Account 5y

          Boring tho

          1. @doorhinge 5y

            ah yes deleting everything, how utterly boring

            1. Deleted Account 5y

              Better to cd and delete stuff in the background

              1. Deleted Account 5y

                Awesome

              2. @d_kozlov 5y

                Ahaha :)

          2. Deleted Account 5y

            Hm

      3. @pyproman 5y

        Yes

    3. @septafril 5y

      sudoers $(whoami) ALL=/bin/rm NOPASSWD:

      1. @freeapp2014 5y

        lol

  9. @RosCher 5y

    Алиас это вроде еда такая

  10. @ultimaratio 5y

    if deleting is boring, try chmod a-x /bin/chmod

    1. @zunkree 5y

      find / -executable -type f -exec chmod a-x {} \+

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