Protection of The Filesystem Root
Sun Microsystems introduced "rm -rf /" protection in Solaris 10, first released in 2005. Upon executing the command, the system now reports that the removal of / is not allowed. Shortly after, the same functionality was introduced into FreeBSD version of rm utility. GNU rm refuses to execute rm -rf / if the --preserve-root option is given, which has been the default since version 6.4 of GNU Core Utilities was released in 2006.
Read more about this topic: Rm (Unix)
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—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
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“I will go root away
The noisome weeds which without profit suck
The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)