• exu@feditown.comOP
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      13 days ago

      I ran the command without sudo first. It had a bunch of permission errors removing stuff in /tmp. So I retried but with sudo

      • superkret@feddit.org
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        13 days ago

        /tmp is world-writable. If you get permission-errors, you should become suspicious.
        Also, whenever you write “sudo rm -rf” you should quadruple-check if that’s really what you want to do.
        Non-interactively deleting entire directories in root space isn’t something you should have to do normally.

          • shoki@lemmy.world
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            13 days ago

            Exactly! if a service running under root creates a file, it belongs to root. if that file has permissions that don’t allow other users to write (most do), then you can’t delete it without sudo afaik

        • exu@feditown.comOP
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          13 days ago

          Agreed, I should have been more careful. Fortunately it was just my downloads folder.
          In wanted to clear my /tmp, because I’d run out of space there for extracting an ISO file. It lives on a tmpfs, so space is quite limited.