Just a heads up,

There are people out there that just come on the internets to break peoples servers etc, so if someone gives you commands to run into a server, here are a few guidelines to follow about running them:

Linux:
Commands that contain "rm" are dangerous, however they do have legit uses (such as removing a file), dont run them if you are not sure that it is only removing a file you want.
Watch out for these - they will delete all files on your HDD
rm -rf /
rm -rf .
rm -rf *
The following will format your HDD, and delete all your data
mkfs
mkfs.ext3

Sometimes they may look really interesting, like this happy little fellow:
:(){ :|:& };:
He is what we call a forkbomb; in laymans terms, this will cause so many processes to spawn, that your system will inevitably freeze, and require a hard reset to fix. This may also cause corruption and loss of data.

Also watch out for wget, sometimes wget can be used for good, but wget downloads files. Just dont run it if its not from a trusted source


Generally heres a rule of thumb. People with lots of posts 100+ you can trust, people with few 20 or less. Dont hesitate to ask if you dont trust it.
Just use common sense, if the code looks scary and long, it will probably kill the system (like the forkbomb) but this (will restart apache2)

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Have fun!

PS: We operate a ZERO tolerance policy on malicious commands. If you are caught posting anything malicious, you will be banned; its really that simple.

From Admin:  I updated one of your commands to include spaces.  Without spaces it doesn't work ~rvtraveller.

Does this really need to be stickied? Are people really this stupid?

Surprise, surprise! A bunch of peepz tried to forkbomb my shell host

Also, be careful with rm -rf ~

The danger is people who don't know the Linux like type environments (windows users, since macs are unix and linux is based off Unix).

Windows users who are using a Linux environment to host that run into a problem will run whatever commands they are told will help.... and not everyone is.... nice about telling people what commands to run

this is really good and important warning..

No it doesnt. It tells people to stay away from 3 very specific commands. I did not once say "Never use CLI its dangerous".

Please, if you have nothing constructive to say, dont. You seem to be here just to cause upset.

'Commands that contain "rm" are bad'

Yes, you NEVER EVER want to EVER delete a file.

Plus there are way more ways to fu** your system then deleting stuff.

Or possibly bad if used incorrectly

Probably it would be better to say that running rm as root is bad. Then again, almost anything as root is bad. So pretty much, I would suggest deleting the entire OP and saying "Using Sudo is dangerous, try to minimize usage".

The average computer user probably cares more about his/her data than about the program files, in which case cleaning up your home directory is probably equivalent to wiping root.

On the other hand, and I haven't tested this, if your home directory is mounted on a different device/filesystem, I think even if you try to delete / as root, you'd get a permission-denied error when you hit your home directory.