$ sudo rm -rf /
rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on ‘/’
rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe
Relatively modern distro, but this has been in coreutils for awhile (it was fixed in Ubuntu's coreutils in 2008 for instance)
$ egrep '^(NAME|VERSION)=' /etc/os-release
NAME="Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation"
VERSION="7.2 (Maipo)"
Yes, I just did this on the workstation I'm typing on. I'm somewhat curious if he did that on absolutely ancient distros (>8 year old), or didn't actually run rm -rf, but the ansible python equivalent.
Someone brought that to my attention on Schneier's blog suggesting the post was trolling. I'm holding off on going that far for now as some details might be missing & this sort of thing has happened many times. I don't use Ansible. Does it have the --no-preserve-root or other modifiers necessary on modern distros already in it?