How to delete entire system using Terminal

Question

How can I delete my entire system using terminal? I know that the beginning is rm, but then what?

Answer 1

As root, you could do:

rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

Normally, we try to avoid these things. :)

Answer 2

Most modern Linux distributions actually disable the ability of removing root by default So to get through this you would use the --no-preserve-rootflag.

The complete code to remove the root directory (/) is

rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

you would need to run this as root though.

Another way of doing this is using dd the command for this is

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd[x]

where [x] is the drive you want to erase. This rewrites each bit of your drive to 0 which permanently erases everything.

Answer 3

Depending on what you mean by deleting, you might get better results by

# for d in /dev/[sh]d? ; do dd if=/dev/zero of=${d} ; done ;