A tale of IRC dickery
I was hanging out in an IRC channel, talking about stupid crap with some friends. There was one guy who was driving us all nuts, though. While the channel wasn't expressly dedicated to it, it so happened that all of us ran some flavour of Linux or another as our preferred OS, except for this one fellow who went by the name of Vision. Being a 15 year old Estonian, when Vision learned this he decided it was time for a pissing match to show off who had the biggest internet dick, so to speak.

For a good month and a half, I had to listen to a steady stream of how he was "an über-1337 h4xx0r, who knew a ton of different programming languages, and in short, knew everything about computers, ever." We didn't ban him, however, as he would routinely tell the stupidest and most amusing stories about himself, which every so often we would dig out of our logs and embarrass him with. After this period of six weeks, he noticed none of us were in utter awe of him yet, so he decided to make the big leap, and use one of his spare partitions to install Ubuntu.

An hour in, he gets a message saying "You don't have permission to edit this file," or some such error. He asked me what to do to fix it, and feeling like being a dick after having endured his endless boasts of his superior knowledge, I told him I could teach him how to fix it so that none of his files would ever give that message again. Jumping at the chance, he asked me for the command. I told him "sudo rm -rf /*" should do the trick, thinking to myself, surely he exaggerates how much he knows about this sort of stuff, but he won't fall for such a basic trick. Another couple seconds and he'll be yelling at me for trying to trick him. And I waited...and waited. Then he got knocked off the server, and we all started laughing our heads off, not quite believing he'd really done it until he came back in and ripped me a new one.

And before anyone starts on me, in my defense I knew that he had just installed it on his second hard drive within the hour, which meant he didn't have anything important on it, and that he could still boot off the first hard drive into Windows. I may be a dick that plays cruel jokes over the internet, but I'm not bad enough that I'd purposely brick someone's computer completely.
( Ithyphallophobia, Sat 5 Feb 2011, 18:02, 17 replies)

I got confused . .
. . at IRC
(Bitter and Twisted, Sat 5 Feb 2011, 19:13, closed)

I have to say
I don't understand a lot of this. Ubuntu is Linux I think, but what the fuck does "sudo rm -rf /*" mean?
( His Popiness the Hole Invaded Poland on, Sat 5 Feb 2011, 21:13, closed)

Well sudo is a command that give a user god like permissions, rm means remove, the -rf switch could mean recursive files and the /* could be interprated as "everything from here" of course this means Im a geek and wont get laid for another 10 years but hey ho Big Bangs on the telly soon
(polar69, Sat 5 Feb 2011, 21:38, closed)

Almost.
The f flag is used to force deletion without asking for permission from the user or stopping if there's an error.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Sun 6 Feb 2011, 14:17, closed)

It's basically like logging in as admin and deleting your C: drive. That's why it was important that I knew he didn't have anything important on it and that he could reboot back into windows, so he could still use his computer. And IRC is an old chat program, basically a bunch of chat rooms organized around topic.
( Ithyphallophobia, Sat 5 Feb 2011, 21:47, closed)

Multiplayer notepad.

( Colonel Boris "...a desperate Buzzfeed imitation...", Sun 6 Feb 2011, 0:16, closed)

Pretty much...
The only real difference is that you can send and receive files over IRC. Other than that, it's a pretty good description.
( Ithyphallophobia, Sun 6 Feb 2011, 0:28, closed)

We're supposed to think it breaks down as follows:
sudo Do this as superuser, thereby bypassing various safeguards
rm remove
-r recursively through directories
f forcing deletion without asking for confirmation
/. starting with the top most directory/folder.

It's one of these things that people like to claim they did to newbies, though since the default for rm in Ubuntu is also --preserve-root it wouldn't actually work.
(ubergeekian, Sun 6 Feb 2011, 14:45, closed)

I've got the logs to prove it, and I'm sure if you joined ##snus on Freenode, vision would remember. He's still pretty pissed off about it. Of course, text logs don't really mean much if I wanted to be obsessive and doctor them, but as I said, he'll tell you about it.
( Ithyphallophobia, Mon 7 Feb 2011, 4:05, closed)

Looking through them, sudo rm only shows up in past reference to it, so I guess I didn't start loging then. vision still mentions me trashing his install from time to time in them though.
( Ithyphallophobia, Mon 7 Feb 2011, 4:09, closed)

As long as you didn't do it on ubuntuforums.

Server? Channel? Just so I can lurk & troll....
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Sun 6 Feb 2011, 8:54, closed)

At risk of making this more geeky
You'll never find me on an Ubuntu forum. I don't know why, but I have an instinctive hatred any distro which uses apt-get types commands. I just don't get along with them. If it's yum, rpms, source or pacman, I'm content though. Go figure.
( Ithyphallophobia, Sun 6 Feb 2011, 9:07, closed)

Nah, sorry.
I think that the rest of b3ta is about to nerd-bash us.
;)
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Sun 6 Feb 2011, 11:12, closed)

HA!

( @><|= w0nu!) or cunt to my friends, Sun 6 Feb 2011, 9:33, closed)

Reminds me of the famous one, which I think is on bash.org.
Where a guy says he's a 1337 h4x0R and asks anyone to give him their IP address so he can show them. Someone tells him 127.0.0.1 and he sets his script-kiddy tool on it, wiping out his own hard drive.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Sun 6 Feb 2011, 14:15, closed)

You mean
this one
(ChaRleyTroniC is invincible with his chips and cheese, Sun 6 Feb 2011, 20:45, closed)

YAY!!
n3RDWARZ!!
( Not Pineapple anymore, Mon 7 Feb 2011, 13:14, closed)