this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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if it just says that and doesn't do anything, there's some extra safety added, maybe in sudo or the shell.
otherwise, it can't remove "/", because it's a mount point in use. the point is that the recursive switch removes all subdirs, which are not mount points, leaving just empty disks an a handful dirs behind.
after i ran it, none of my commands worked. well of course they didn't work, everything but root got wiped, so goodbye /usr/bin and all that
I did that on purpose once to test Timeshift's restore. I had to boot to a live image to run the restoration, but it worked great! Very impressed.
Only applies if the Timeshift directory is not in the removed path.