Unix admins often joke about the legendary dangers of rm -rf /, the nuclear option that promises digital annihilation. But surprisingly, certain early Unix systems survived such brutality without batting an eye. Thanks to filesystems structured in memory and carefully segregated partitions, some ancient Unix versions would let root blithely execute rm -rf / without entirely trashing the system. Users logged in via terminals would obliviously continue their sessions. Modern Linux kernels, ever humorless, now usually prevent such reckless mayhem outright—proving that Unix once offered more opportunities for career-limiting moves than today’s safety-scissor Linux distributions permit.
