This is very much the Linux version of the old tricking gamers to alt+F4 gag.
My favorite was when I was teaching a friend Squad, and we were in a vehicle. I explained you hit the F keys to change seat (which is true), so F1, F2, F3, etc. Noticing that seats 1, 2 and 3 were filled, I then told him he can hold down alt to swap seats faster. He then immediately quits the game xD
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 targetingC:
.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 tellsrm
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.