You are not funny. Your parents are not funny. Your grand parents were not funny. In fact, you have a long standing ancestry of non funny bastards.
I fell for a similar (but less) obvious joke on my first Linux installation back in 1995. That one used dd instead of rm. I lost a lot of code that I had written. After that, I’ve failed to see the humor in this kind of joke. There’s always the risk that someone new doesn’t understand it’s a joke, and tries it out.
I prefer the less harmful “alt+F4” joke, though most people know what that one does by now.
Yeah, it helps freeing RAM and making your pc go faster
What does it actually do?
These are unix/linux terminal actions.
‘sudo’ controls access rights, so it’s effectively like Windows admin rights. People typically wouldn’t be allowed to use sudo unless they own the system or are some kind of system administrator (like in a workplace).
The ‘rm’ is the remove function, or deleting files or folders.
‘-rf’ are two options you can specify with the ‘rm’ part. The ‘-r’ part means recursive, and effectively confirms that you do in fact want to delete a directory (folder). Normally rm would not, and rmdir I think only works on empty directories. The ‘-f’ option forces removal of all items without any prompts for confirmation for individual items found for removal.
Then the ‘/*’ is the file and or directory path you want to remove. In this case it’s the top of the system. The entire statement is essentially a joke about a full delete of your computer.
So kinda like the delete System32 joke but more nuclear?
in Windows you separate each drive by a letter like C:, D:, etc, however on Linux your drives are mounted as part of your folder structure. the top level is called root which would be
/you can then mount each disc as a folder under root, so for example/homecould be a separate hard drive but it’s still mounted under root, note the starting slash. This means the command deletes any and all files+directories under root, this can include mounted USB, mounted network drives and anything mounted to your root. you’re basically nuking all the files you can access when you’re logged in as admin/root.
Something-something trees are an invasive species so add --no-preserve-root
You’re deleting everything but root, so not needed.
