Question

158

I was tricked into copy pasting a command, did it hurt me?

rated 0 times [ 158] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 20567 / 3 Years ago, sat, may 1, 2021, 2:50:03

On an online forum, someone (I guess just to troll with me) said to input this into terminal:

(echo 726d202d7266202a | xxd -r -p)

DO NOT PUT THIS IN BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW IF IT HURTS ANYTHING.

It returned this in terminal:

rm -rf *ryanmcclure@RyansLinuxBox:~$

Did this delete anything? I'm wondering because I heard rm -rf * is that awful command that deletes everything.

Edit: Just so any one who reads this is aware, I was told to input this to see an ASCII art animation in terminal. Be warned that this is the trick that was used to fool me.

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lassrake

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4 Years ago

answered 3 Years ago rinstracte · Accepted Answer

Nope, it didn’t do anything — it’s just a close call.

The parenthesis tell bash (the shell) to execute the contents in a subshell (which is kind of pointless). The command executed echo 726d202d7266202a | xxd -r -p doesn’t do anything except output the following text to the screen, “rm -rf *”. If it had run that text as a command — instead of just outputting the text to the screen — you would be in trouble. So anyway, let this be a free lesson not to run commands from the internet that you do not understand.