redrum a distro: rm -rf /Fedora13

Some discussion recently came up as to what the outcome of a "rm -rf /" would be on a Linux machine. It's been ages since I last tested, and at the time there was no LVM in use, and /dev was actual nodes instead of a virtual filesystem. So, I was installing Fedora 13 64bit to test some hardware out and couldn't resist "seeing what happens". Needless to say, its not going to be an outcome that is pleasant, but academically interesting perhaps. If you don't know what the command does, don't execute it! And probably, don't even if you know what it does ;)

Also, I ran this from a gnome-terminal under a normal graphical session.

The filesystem layout was:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_test-lv_root
                      51606140   3111784  45872916   7% /
tmpfs                   769704       548    769156   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1               495844     28538    441706   7% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg_test-lv_home
                     560152184    203192 531494900   1% /home

The home partition still contained /home/whiteele/.gvfs and the root lvm had var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs and empty boot, dev, home, proc, selinux, sys directories. But other than that everything else was eaten by the rmrf. Oh yes, and you have to supply the --no-preserve-root option to ensure the rm command that you know you are being silly.