this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

This happend to me right noww as I tried to write a gui task manager for the GNU/Linux OS

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

rm -rf

Works for . current directory. Yay!

... also works for / system root. ๐Ÿ”ฅ Nay!

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Does it? I thought / specifically was protected, and you needed to add --no-preserve-root.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

It should, but I the end it depends on your system. Each distro has their own default behavior.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That won't crash your kernel, and I was more curious about the OPs example. Task management is basically reading some files, and sending signals, it should be near impossible to crash the system.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I believe it does crash the system eventually as important buts start to go missing?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Kernel shouldn't crash, and anything running in memory will be okayish, but it definitely will get less and less stable. It won't be possible to start new processes.

I have a Linux install on a USB SSD with a flakey connection, if I bumped the cord the root would unmount. It was fairly resilient, but graphics would slowly start disappearing. I'm fairly sure I could cleanly reboot as long as I had a terminal open, but its been a while, so maybe I'm misremembering.

Still, the overall system becomes pretty useless, so i guess its fair to call it a crash