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

sudo apt install microsoft-edge-stable

I actually like Edge more than Chrome.

I don't use either, die-hard Firefox user for decades but if I'm forced to pick one...
- There's so many good features in Edge. It genuinely sucks that Microsoft is ruining their stuff with popups and forced defaults because Edge and their other software have a lot of thought and care put into them.
Look, a heretic!
Someone put it in AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/microsoft-edge-stable-bin
- It’s also in NixOS for some sick reason: https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=23.11&from=0&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=Microsoft
Is it really available in a Debian or Ubuntu repo?
- it's in basically every distro: https://linuxiac.com/install-microsoft-edge-on-linux/

Many people have given great suggestions for the most destroying commands, but most result in an immediately borked system. While inconvenient, that doesn't have a lasting impact on users who have backups.

I propose writing a bash script set up to run daily in cron, which picks a random file in the user's home directory tree and randomizes just a few bytes of data in the file. The script doesn't immediately damage the basic OS functionality, and the data degradation is so slow that by the time the user realizes something fishy is going on a lot of their documents, media, and hopefully a few months worth of backups will have been corrupted.

Calm down there Satan.
So basically malware by a sadistic internet troll?
It'll just write a new Shakespeare play
- I think we may need to implement a 128 bit unix timestamp before that will work.

If you allow root privileges, there is:

sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

If you want to be malicious:

sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX

or

sudo find / -exec shred -u {} \;

Let's extend a little and really do some damage

for x in /dev/(sd|nvme)*; do dd if=/dev/urandom of=$x bs=1024 & ; done
- Now alias ls= all that. And throw it in a background process. And actually return the value of ls so it doesn't look like anything nefarious is going on.
  
  I bet you could chroot into a ram disk so you're not tearing the floor out from under you.
  
  The victim would find this prank hilarious and everyone would like you and think you're super cool.
- Don’t forget the mmc block devices too. Gotta purge those SD cards. (/dev/mmcblk*)
JFC. That's terminal.
- Yes, you enter that in the terminal
  
  🙃
~~sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX~~

sudo cp /dev/urandom /dev/nvme0n1 or

# cat /dev/urandom > /dev/nvme0n1

Way faster.

But honestly, find ~/ -type f -delete is almost as bad.

Some generative AI is going to swallow this thread and burp it up later

My wife's job is to train AI to not do that. It's pretty interesting, actually.
- A bad actor doesn't care what your wife does. :)
- How does she accomplish it?

cat bomb_threat.txt | mail [email protected]

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
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?

vim

Everyone else talking about how to shred files or even the BIOS is missing a big leap, yeah. Not just destroying the computer: destroying the person in front of it! And vim is happy to provide. 😅
Emotional damage
True, just entering vim on a pc for a user who doesn't know about vim's existence is basically a prison sentence. They will literally be trapped in vim hell until they power down their PC.
- I once entered vim into a computer. I couldn't exit. I tried unplugging the computer but vim persisted. I took it to the dump, where I assume vim is still running to this very day.

Worst I can imagine would be something like zeroing your bios using flashrom.

Sometimes EDID eeproms are writable from i2c-dev... And sometimes VRM configuration ports too...

Everyone is deleting data, but with proper backups that's not a problem. How about:

curl insert_url_here | sudo bash

This can really mess up your life.

Even if the script isn't malicious, if the internet drops out halfway the download you might end up with a "rm -r /", or similar, command.

So many things these days use that install.sh piping stuff, very bad practice.

Everyone is talking about rm -rf / and damage to storage drives, but I read somewhere about EFI variables having something to do with bricking the computer. If this is possible, then it's a lot more damage than just disk drives.

Edit: this is interesting SE post https://superuser.com/questions/313850

Systemd mounted them r/w. https://askubuntu.com/questions/521293/an-ubuntu-command-bricked-my-system#767286

Probably dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda or whatever your system volume is

Posible to recover data, use /dev/urandom.
- Only on very old hard disks, on newer disks there's no difference between overwrite patterns
With wear levelling on SSDs you may be able to recover some of the data
I did have RH Linux die while updating core libs a very long time ago. It deleted them and the system shut down. No reboot possible. I eventually (like later that day) copied a set of libs from another rh system and was able to boot and recover.

Never used rh by choice again after that.

Ctrl-D

Kills the terminal instantly.

Unless ignoreeof is on

:(){:|:&};:

That 'amp;' does not belong in there, it's probably either a copy-paste error or a Lemmy-error.

What this does (or would do it it were done correctly) is define a function called ":" (the colon symbol) which recursively calls itself twice, piping the output of one instance to the input of the other, then forks the resulting mess to the background. After defining that fork bomb of a function, it is immediately called once.

It's a very old trick that existed even on some of the ancient Unix systems that predated Linux. I think there's some way of defending against using cgroups, but I don't know how from the top of my head.
- It's a lemmy problem
- I think however you're accessing Lemmy is rendering it wrong. I see the usual function.
I think poor Lemmy is trying to help URL encode your fork bomb lol
I was going to suggest a fork bomb, but it is recovered easily. Then I thought about inserting a fork bomb into .profile, or better, into a boot process script, like:

echo ':(){:|:&};:' | sudo tee -a /bin/iptables-apply

That could be pretty nasty. But still, pretty easy to recover from, so not really "destructive."
Came here for this one. Not the most destructive, but certainly the most elegant.

"wipefs -a" instantly removes filesystem signatures. It's fast, doesn't actually delete data but is just as effective in most cases where you're not worried about someone trying to recover it. Much faster than rm on /. As far as the OS is concerned the drive is then empty.

"nvme format" is also fast.

whoami

It really was a feat that they were able to implement the Total Perspective Vortex in busybox.

Is there a command that will publish your browsing history?

This is probably a start: https://askubuntu.com/questions/631631/getting-internet-browsing-history-from-shell#631637

I don't know about how exactly to do it, but I do have an idea or two.

Something that will reflash the firmware on as many devices as possible using garbage data. At least the UEFI.
Filling most of the drive space, leaving let's say 50MB, then overwriting those 50MB repeatedly to damage the hardware itself. I suppose you could do the same with RAM. If we're dealing with PMR/CMR HDD, then you should just be able to write to specific sectors without doing it by filling the rest.
If present, keep ejecting the DVD drive. Either the mechanism dies or someone accidentally bumps into the open tray and breaks it off.
Keep hard rebooting the laptop after some time. It may corrupt some data, and put the blame on hardware. The hard reboot can be done by echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger This will need magic SysRq compiled into the kernel, and power off/reboot enabled. The latter can be done by enabling all magic SysRq functions echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq or just reboot/power off with "128".

Dd is known as disk destroyer for a good reason. Very easy to fuck yourself over.

I can't remember but having my hard drive encrypted, I believe there is a single file that messing with it would render the drive not decryptable.

Here is the command that will render a LUKS encrypted device un recoverable
From the documentation.

5.4 How do I securely erase a LUKS container?

For LUKS, if you are in a desperate hurry, overwrite the LUKS header and key-slot area. For LUKS1 and LUKS2, just be generous and overwrite the first 100MB. A single overwrite with zeros should be enough. If you anticipate being in a desperate hurry, prepare the command beforehand. Example with /dev/sde1 as the LUKS partition and default parameters:

head -c 100000000 /dev/zero > /dev/sde1; sync

smbios-token-ctl pick one of the "dangerous - permanent write once" tokens

1.- I will start with the infamous rm-rf /

I don't think there's anything shorter or more elegant than this really. When you're right you're right.
Alias ls="sudo rm -rf / > /dev/null"

would be hilarious

emacs

(Runs away....)

shutdown -h now

Sucks when the host is remote and you do a -h instead if a -r

Sudo pacman -Syu

hdparm --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing --sanitize-crypto-scramble /dev/sda

Modern disks have encryption enabled in disk level. This will change the encryption key on the disk, meaning that in seconds all data in the disk is in unrecoverable state.

This is way better than writing the whole disk 0's or rm -fr /

been there and done rm -rf as root

Why?
- because I wanted to delete something? It was probably 23 odd years ago

I'd imagine rm has easily caused the most destruction.

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda

Wipes the entire disk and replaced it with random data.

If you have to ask, you're not ready to know.

tar czf /dev/sda /home

sudo apt install gnome

That wouldn't work on my system.

Typing apt just opens the man page for pacman.
- btw
sudo apt remove ratpoison

alias cp="rm -rf"

bonus points for putting it into the shells RC file.

Not as destructive as deleting root, but a lot more sneakier

Destructive for me or for others?

for the terminal's operating system

./fire_nukes.sh

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdx will overwrite every single byte of /dev/sdx with random data. Replace /dev/sdx with the drive you want to wipe. Optionally, specify a larger block size to speed it up more.

Noted

I was a newbie user, telling a friend of mine about rm -rf /*. I typed it in a hit Enter, telling him it doesn't harm since I didn't enter sudo. But I'd forgotten that I have still permission to delete my home directory. 🥲😂

sudo apt-get install factorio

Good luck recovering from that one