What is the most destroying command you can type in the Linux terminal?

You're viewing a single thread.

139 comments

sudo chmod 000 -R / is very fun way of braking your system and is not widely known 🙂
- Can you recover from that?
  
  I imagine if you can mount from a busybox possibly
  
  Then figure out the correct perms.
  
  Eh, just hit it with the 777 and pray. Then swear at it some more.
  
  I think you'll need to change passwd and shadow, maybe a few other files, but besides that it'll mostly work.
  
  This is the traditional method.
  
  Yeah that's the painful part. A backup would be key here
  
  Worst case you boot up a virtual server with the same OS as your own and just go down the tree learning permissions, and it’s a deep dive learning experience.
  
  chroot in and then syncing the permissions from something like the equivalent of filesystem package in Arch for your distro should get you going
- What does this do? nobody can read any file? would sudo chmod 777 fix it at least to a usable system?
  
  The trick is that you loose access to every file on the system. chmod is also a file. And ls. And sudo. You see where it's going. System will kinda work after this command, but rebooting (which by a coincidence is a common action for "fixing" things) will reveal that system is dead.
  
  Yep. You could run chmod again to fix it (from a different OS / rescue USB), but that would leave all the permissions in a messy state - having everything set to 777 is incredibly insecure, and will also likely break many apps/scripts that expect more restrictive permissions. So the only way to fix this properly would be to reinstall your OS/restore from backups.
  
  How are you gonna run chmod when you don't have permissions to use it anymore?

139 comments