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realolast Sunday at 11:57 PM1 replyview on HN

Try that one instead:

mv ~/. /dev/null

Better.

Extra points if you achieve that one also:

mv /. /dev/null

Slashdot aficionados might object to that last one, though.


Replies

klempnerlast Monday at 12:52 AM

Speaking of Slashdot, some fairly frequent poster had a signature back around 2001/2002 had a signature that was something like

mv /bin/laden /dev/null

and then someone explained how that was broken: even if that succeeds, what you've done is to replace the device file /dev/null with the regular file that was previously at /bin/laden, and then whenever other things redirect their output to /dev/null they'll be overwriting this random file than having output be discarded immediately, which is moderately bad.

Your version will just fail (even assuming root) because mv won't let you replace a file with a directory.