This happend to me right noww as I tried to write a gui task manager for the GNU/Linux OS
rm -rf <some placeholder>
Works for . current directory. Yay!
… also works for / system root. 🔥 Nay!
Does it? I thought / specifically was protected, and you needed to add --no-preserve-root.
That won’t crash your kernel, and I was more curious about the OPs example. Task management is basically reading some files, and sending signals, it should be near impossible to crash the system.
I believe it does crash the system eventually as important buts start to go missing?
Kernel shouldn’t crash, and anything running in memory will be okayish, but it definitely will get less and less stable. It won’t be possible to start new processes.
I have a Linux install on a USB SSD with a flakey connection, if I bumped the cord the root would unmount. It was fairly resilient, but graphics would slowly start disappearing. I’m fairly sure I could cleanly reboot as long as I had a terminal open, but its been a while, so maybe I’m misremembering.
Still, the overall system becomes pretty useless, so i guess its fair to call it a crash
