Thanks to the power of Linux, there is a virtually infinite set of commands that can mess up your system and/or destroy your data. While I have never seen anyone advise someone else to run these commands, it is definitely a potential issue that a newbie could be told to run a command that would destroy his or her data and system. As demonstrated by this post, there are plenty of commands that are very hard to recognize, but will wipe out data.

Already, some Linux distros (such as Ubuntu) are putting stickies in their forums advising new users against running potentially malicious commands, but it is not realistic to think that everyone will read these stickies. So how can new users be protected against this possibility? A good step would be to add an additional layer of protection (in addition to sudo) that warns new users when they attempt to execute commands that are either common malicious commands (sudo rm -rf /, for example – don’t try it) or might destroy a large number of files.

This would be a simple step that could be taken as a preventive measure to ensure that no new users are greeted with a nasty suprise when they go to look for their files.

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