alt Hacker NewsTo meekly defend the indefensible here: it's not like rmdir on Linux (I won't speak for all Unixen) can cause loss of data, since it only removes empty directories.
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MattSteelblade • today at 4:11 PM
In this case, the rm -rf before that does. The rmdir is the Windows command in this example and with /s /q, it will quietly delete everything.
Yep, but that could still cause issues (those entries could be used as signals, or be mount points for currently unmounted partitions, etc). rmdir anything that start with "/" should be an absolute no-go.
To say nothing about running a sequence of shell commands without the -e option.