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NerdOfLinux
Asked: 2017-11-29 12:25:34 +0800 CST

Why does the SSH session not die after rm -rf /?

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Just for fun, on a VPS I was about to terminate anyway, I ran

sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root

and after that all commands, including 

/bin/bash

returned command not found, which makes sense as they were deleted. But how was I still SSHed into it, and able to somewhat use bash even though the files no longer existed?

bash

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The OS and services run in memory, so they can keep running (but of course they cannot load anything from disk any more).

    You will also not be able to open another ssh-session :-)

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