Ubuntu command

[Vikeyev]

My mates were having a giggle about this picture and won't tell me what the command means.

Would anybody here care to tell me what the command means I would really like to know what is so funny about it.

Thank you for your time and sorry about the trivial post but google turns up nothing important when I type in that post.

[Irithori]

Just... dont type that command.

Rather read the man page to rm

man rm

rm MAN Page

[Vikeyev]

Just... dont type that command.

Rather read the man page to rm

man rm

rm MAN Page

Thanks for that but one more question.

If the rm means remove and the -rf tells it to do so recursively, well how does it delete something recursively, once its deleted isn't it gone?

[rrl]

This would delete the parent directories and all the subdirectories in it. Everything. rm or rmdir deletes empty directories. You will get an error trying to delete a folder with contents using the rm command.

[three18ti]

Thanks for that but one more question.

If the rm means remove and the -rf tells it to do so recursively, well how does it delete something recursively, once its deleted isn't it gone?

-f means force, just obliterate.

-r means remove recursively.
you may want to review recursion:
Recursion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

rm -r /home/foo effectively translates to:

rm /home/foo/bar/path/to/some/nested/path/*
rm /home/foo/bar/path/to/some/nested/path
rm /home/foo/bar/path/to/some/nested/*
rm /home/foo/bar/path/to/some/nested
rm /home/foo/bar/path/to/some/*
rm /home/foo/bar/path/to/some
rm /home/foo/bar/path/to/*
rm /home/foo/bar/path/to
rm /home/foo/bar/path/*
rm /home/foo/bar/path
rm /home/foo/bar/*
rm /home/foo/bar
rm /home/foo/*
rm /home/foo

[jayd512]

If you really want to know what it does: YouTube

[ron2794]

as someone above said that when you type -r then it means recursively that is
firstly the files in the directory will be deleted and then the folder itself and then the files along with the folder in the directory and so on.

What is the use of this, don't you think it is stupid.. It would be much better if there is a command that deletes all what we want to delete at once that is without recusion.

[Irithori]

all what we want to delete at once that is without recusion.

I dont get what you are saying.
Can you make an example?
-r, -f and the combination of both make perfect sense to me as they are working now.

[ron2794]

According to user : "three18ti"

The command is deleting the directory one by one, which might take a long time. So its a stupid command according to me.
Hence Recursion is useless according to me.

It would be better if the command deletes the files without recursion i.e without -r, because without recursion it don't deletes the files in steps like three18ti showed above.
Hence the process would be much faster according to me.

[Irithori]

If you use -r, then you explicitly tell rm to delete recursively.
Yes, this takes time, as
a) there is more to do
b) the datastructure (filesystem) needs to be kept consistent.