WARNING: Do NOT run rm -rf /

Key Takeaways

It's worth explaining what each command does by the end of the video. Also, this love it, but it would have been better if you'd open up gnome file manager and show directories and then explain what it actually does. It removes files. LS is the starting point. R means recursively, means going inside subdirectories and again in subdirectories deleting everything. And F is forcefully doing it. Okay, so this was based on the video where I showed you how to destroy a Linux system using a single command based on the PewDiePie video. So, I use this command sudo rm {dash} rf {forward slash} star to delete the Linux system. So, in Linux, if you use the command with the option {dash} {dash} help, it explains to you what that command does. So, rm help This can be used to delete files and directories. You could also just do a search in Google as an example. The AI tells us that the rm command in Linux is used to delete files and directories. It stands for remove. It's a powerful tool, so be careful using it as I've demonstrated. {dash} f means force. Ignore non-existent files and arguments, never prompt. R is recursive, so remove directories and their contents recursively. So, sudo means run as root. rm means we're going to remove files and directories, so remove. Recursive, force, root. This is the root directory in Linux. We don't want to do that. If I press enter now, we told that this is very dangerous to do on root. So, Linux does give you a fail-safe in this example, but you can override that by either just putting star there or adding no preserve root at the end of the command to delete everything. When I press enter now with no preserve root or simply add star, what you'll notice is a bunch of directories disappeared. Stuff is being deleted. Now, one of the comments was like, "Linux can't do everything." Now, in some cases it won't be able to delete everything, but notice it destroys my system. You'll see that stuff will disappear. So, as an example, if I press enter here and type ls, command is not found. pwd, can see I'm in root, but a lot of commands are not working. cd, can't move. Terminal disappeared now. Try to go back here, doesn't work. Can't go to the CD-ROM. I'll try and go back to root now. A lot of stuff has been destroyed. So, if I try and reboot this by going to power reset, my system has lost a lot of data. This is why I recommend that you use a virtual machine if you're new to Linux, because what you can do here is just create a snapshot. So, if you destroy it like I've just demonstrated within a virtual machine using either VirtualBox or VMware Workstation as an example, create a snapshot, you can simply restore it to the point of the last snapshot that you created. So, there you go, I'm back again.