Many Linux newbies love to copy and paste every command they see on the net, curious to find out what they do. Running these following commands won’t kill you, but you’ll wish you were dead. Linux gives full control over the system if you are logged in as root user, running anyone of the following commands without clear understanding of them would lead to a disaster situation.



dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda formats hard disk back to the factory settings.

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda will format all data from the device specified after the mkfs command.

mv ~ /dev/null will erase everything from your root directory.  Basically /dev/null does not exists and anything written to it is actually discarded from the system.

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/port run this command if you are eager to freeze your Linux system.

:(){:|:&};: is a forkbomb command, once you run it, it will let you system freeze and you will have no other way except to have it hard reboot ( Please don’t run this command if you are feeling curiosity, consequences can be bitter )

rsync -r –delete /home/backup such commands has a delete switch  that can be used to destroy parts of the file system.

shutdown -h now shuts your system down and you will have to hard reboot it, don’t run this command if you are hosting your servers in any data center or colocation. run shutdown -r now instead.

any_command> / dev / sda This command causes total loss of data, in the partition that is mentioned in command

http://some_untrusted_source wget-O-| sh Never download untrusted sources and below are implemented, they may be malicious codes

find ./ * -exec rm {} \; This removes every file from the current directory on.

find . / * -exec rm {} \; This also removes removes every file from the current directory plus every file from the root directory forward!

Conclusion

I’m sure that are other equally deadly Linux commands that I failed to include here, so if you have something to add, please share it with us via comment.