I made a quick video to show what exactly happens when you type rm -fr / on a Linux machine.
Spoiler: nothing, actually. At least, not until you use the --no-preserve-root flag.
Big, very big, warning: do. not. run. these. commands. on. your .servers. Some distributions prevent you from running the ‘rm’, but older distributions will happily delete all your files.
This was a nice test in screen capture and basic video editing, there isn’t much to it otherwise.
Sidenote: while making this video, I learned the hard way that Vagrant auto-mounts its project directories. And when you tell rm to be recursive, it’ll be recursive. Woops..