"It's good advice. There's an unfortunate tradition, among some
Linux users, of documenting command-line operations in their most
abstruse possible form, in order to show off the poster's coding
prowess. Instead of explaining what's happening one step at a time,
Linux documentation in forums and how-to's often strings together
multiple commands in a dense series of pipes that users are
expected to paste in and execute in good faith. Mathis offers some
advice about how to evaluate such scripts and judge their potential
to do harm. She suggests Googling unknown commands, and being wary
of commands like rm -rf, dd, mkfs, and even tar, all of which have
the potential to destroy your Linux filesystem."
