(coreutils.info.gz) Treating / specially

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 2.11 Treating '/' specially
 ===========================
 
 Certain commands can operate destructively on entire hierarchies.  For
 example, if a user with appropriate privileges mistakenly runs 'rm -rf /
 tmp/junk', that may remove all files on the entire system.  Since there
 are so few legitimate uses for such a command, GNU 'rm' normally
 declines to operate on any directory that resolves to '/'.  If you
 really want to try to remove all the files on your system, you can use
 the '--no-preserve-root' option, but the default behavior, specified by
 the '--preserve-root' option, is safer for most purposes.
 
    The commands 'chgrp', 'chmod' and 'chown' can also operate
 destructively on entire hierarchies, so they too support these options.
 Although, unlike 'rm', they don't actually unlink files, these commands
 are arguably more dangerous when operating recursively on '/', since
 they often work much more quickly, and hence damage more files before an
 alert user can interrupt them.  Tradition and POSIX require these
 commands to operate recursively on '/', so they default to
 '--no-preserve-root', but using the '--preserve-root' option makes them
 safer for most purposes.  For convenience you can specify
 '--preserve-root' in an alias or in a shell function.
 
    Note that the '--preserve-root' option also ensures that 'chgrp' and
 'chown' do not modify '/' even when dereferencing a symlink pointing to
 '/'.
 
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