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.
Pro tip: Omit the dot
.before the/to make sure you cleansed the language pack thoroughly.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 /*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?
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:
rmis the command to delete files and folders-fis the force modifier. This means it’ll keep going even if it encounters problems and just delete as much as it can-ris 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 tellsrmthat 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.Oh, like a more sophisticated version of the old "put your phone in the microwave"joke!
Thank you, kind person.
Or the less destructive, “Press Alt+F4 to triforce.”
They’re all lying to you. It actually removes Romanian – for real
I mean, it does remove every language, that’s for sure.
As long as it removes French it’s worth it.
I’m a simple man, I see code and I copy and paste it into the terminal with no understanding of what it does.
Gotta make sure the root language is removed also. Add
--no-preserve-rootfor that.