Deadly Linux Commands Little Cause For Concern With Bash On Windows

At Build last week, Microsoft made quite a bit of noise in the Linux community when it announced that Bash would be coming to Windows 10 this summer. Yesterday, the company released a new build to Windows Insiders that contains Bash which means for the first time, we can tinker with the new feature.

Wanting to leave no stone unturned, especially when it comes to wrecking my own file structure, it was worth asking about the ‘deadly’ commands from Bash to see if they would do the same damage on Windows.

Fortunately, because of the way that Microsoft implemented Bash on Windows, commands such as rm -rf /, will not destroy you machine. As Scott Hanselman notes on Twitter, root on Windows is not the same as root on Linux which means this recursive delete command will not harm your data integrity.

But, that doesn’t mean commands cannot disrupt your machine, if you do run Bash as admin and then /Mnt/c, it is still possible to nuke your Windows install. In short, the default setup for Bash will not let these commands do harm but if you really want to destroy your Windows install from within Bash, it is possible.

If you are curious what else is new in the build of Windows 10 that Microsoft released yesterday, you can check out our gallery here.