This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Oscar
We all know that rm -rf / can nuke your installation of Linux instantly, but what other ways can you break your Linux?
By the way, I tested everything that I’m about to talk about on a fully installed Linux Mint VM (on Windows with Hyper-V, sadly, cause I can’t be bothered to set up a virtual machine on Arch).
If you prefer to consume this article as a video, check this out!
Changing your system time ⏰
Yes, seriously.
Now I hear you saying: what does that have to do with anything? And doesn’t my time sync automatically? Well, yes, and you do have to disable that. And consequently, this is pretty easy to fix. But it can still completely mess up your system.
This is because a lot of encryption actually relies on time and timestamps, and if your computer is set to 2010, things like SSL, HTTPS, and a few other things simply won’t work.
Anyways, disabling and changing the time is something that you can do on your Linux that shouldn't leave any permanent damage. But please do your own research before you try and break your wonderful installation of Arch.
Actually doing it 🔨
You can disable ntp – this is the Network Time Protocol: the thing that makes sure your computer's time is correct – and then set the date and time like so.
sudo service ntp stop
date -s '2014-12-25 12:34:56'
The only other thing I want to mention here is the kinda interesting warning page by FireFox that pops up when you try to access the web over HTTPS after changing the system time. It provides a helluva lot of information, but surprisingly, it doesn’t mention Linux.
You can check out the following URL if you’re on FireFox and curious: chrome://global/content/neterror/supportpages/time-errors.html.
But again, this is pretty easy to fix and it should even fix itself automatically if you don’t disable ntp!
Let's destroy systemd! 🤯
Now, for a more unique way of destroying your system, you can delete systemd targets. And if you’re not on systemd, you’re probably on OpenRC and the equivalent there is OpenRC runlevels.
Now what are systemd targets and what do they do? Well, when your system starts, you don’t just want everything starting at once. That’s a bad idea for a lot of reasons.
So what you do is you have these groups that start and stop different systemd unit files (things like .service files that you’ve probably seen before) at different times, and these groups are what systemd calls targets. And as I mentioned, they’re pretty synonymous with runlevels. So when we delete these targets and reboot, everything should break.
One thing I should note is that I deleted the /systemd/system/ directories in lib and etc entirely. These include both the .service files that you’ve probably seen and interacted with before and the .target files – as well as all of the other types of systemd unit files. So we’re really just nuking systemd as a whole.
# Yes, we could only delete the .target files... but what's the fun in that?
sudo rm -rf /systemd/system/
Now originally, I thought that this was just going to affect the reboot and startup, since that’s one of the only times that systemd is used. Right? Other than controlling daemons, of course. Well, kind of. Systemd is used, like, everywhere, apparently. I tried to reboot after deleting these files, and as both I and you probably guessed, I couldn’t. I couldn’t shut down either.
Now for the fun part: I couldn’t even manually close the VM. This is the end of this section of the article and the end of this VM – literally, I couldn’t access the VM after this.
If you’ve done this before and know what’s going on… let me know.
I’m guessing it’s something with Hyper-V and how it’s shutting down Linux, but either way, systemd clearly plays a large role in everything on your system, and removing it has consequences. Which I should’ve expected.
rm -rf/ doesn't work? ⌨️
Also while we’re here, rm -rf / doesn’t actually do anything.
It needs the --no-preserve-root argument to actually do something (which for obvious reasons, is good, and including sudo is also probably a good option if you wanna get the full nuclear effect). But once you add that flag, everything, as you might imagine, just… implodes.
You’ll see a few things that can’t be deleted for whatever reason, and nothing really seems to be out of order initially. That is until you start trying to run simple commands. And then when you click out of your terminal, things start magically disappearing. You can try and swap to a TTY, but nothing will happen. Everything is gone.
When you reboot your machine you’ll be entered into grub rescue mode. Now I did try a few things to try and get out of rescue mode, but if you couldn’t already tell, we just launched a nuclear attack on our system and, well, it worked.
There’s almost no chance we’re getting anything back, not easily at least.
:(){ :|:& };: 🍴
Next, a fork bomb. You’ve probably seen this little monstrosity floating around the internet a few times.
Now when I ran this, I was expecting everything to just freeze. But that didn’t happen. So what did? Well, the way this fork bomb works is by spawning a bunch of user processes. And there’s a few ways to limit user processes. Some of which I’m sure Linux Mint utilizes out of the box.
Things like ulimit or limits.conf, and there’s also this thing called PAM which stands for Pluggable Authentication Modules. So what actually ended up happening was nothing. After a quarter second or less, processes just stopped spawning.
Now I did try and change ulimit and limits.conf and some stuff with PAM but I never got that to work.
ulimit -u 1000000
# These should be the same thing?
sudo vim /etc/security/limits.conf # etc...
# pam_limits.so seems to be controlled by limits.conf
Either way, due to the nature of how this fork bomb works, I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t have a permanent effect on your system. It just spawns a bunch of user processes.
The slow death... ☀️
Ok, next is the slow death: deleting your package manager.
This is actually kind of a pain to do. On Linux Mint, you have to use dpkg to remove apt, and as far as I’m aware, dpkg doesn’t actually do anything in terms of managing packages and software, so we don’t have to worry about removing it. It just interacts with .deb files directly. And I have no idea how you would even begin removing something like pacman (Arch Linux). Maybe just delete a few folders.
# Forgot to record what I did here so... I'm kinda guessing
dpkg -P apt
# or (?)
sudo apt-get purge apt
Anyways, this doesn’t have much of an effect initially. As you can see, I can still access the software that was already installed, which makes sense. We’re uninstalling the package manager, not the software itself. And you could totally still install software with curl or wget or git or something else. And I can reboot, and I can carry on with my normal life.
But with all of the packages and software that most users have installed, this little change would slowly become catastrophic. For example, I have 1258 1247 (apparently) packages installed on Arch.
pacman -Q | wc -l
# 1247
There are constant updates and bug fixes being pushed to these packages, and not updating these packages and software on a regular basis leaves me open to more and more security vulnerabilities.
And back to the distro that I was using to test this, Linux Mint, the update manager does naturally break when you uninstall apt. Which again, leaves us open to a continuously growing number of security vulnerabilities.
Can we fix it? 🏗️
Now the question that I want to answer now is the following: can you always repair your system?
While I was researching for this article, I realized that this is an absolutely mammoth question to ask with so many loose ends. But for the methods that we tried…
- Systemd? You can probably get that back, just as long as you don’t have to reboot.
- Rm -rf /? Not without data recovery software. And even then, I’m not sure.
- Fork bomb? Not permanent.
- System time? Definitely fixable.
- Package manager? This… is interesting. Again, you can still download stuff after deleting your package manager, but I’m not sure if you can just drop a new version of apt into your system and have it work out of the box.
But what have you broken in your time using Linux? How many times have you reinstalled your distro? Let me know in the comments!
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Oscar
Oscar | Sciencx (2025-08-23T13:06:55+00:00) 5 ways to destroy your Linux. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/08/23/5-ways-to-destroy-your-linux/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.