this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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Nobody deletes “./“. It’s far far more likely to be “/ tmp/file”
Also, without the -f it will prompt you. Chances are, the meme is with -f
The other possibility, though I haven’t tested it, is the working directory is / and they did “rm -rf .” Without first checking with pwd. I know that most OS will refuse to remove root without passing in a special flag nowadays. Only a few OS still respect you as sudo.
Though the check isn't very sophisticated, if memory serves. It more or less checks whether / is passed to
rm -r.If you did something like
rm -r $VAR/*, but didn't check to make sure that$VARwas set and not empty, it could still fire, since rm wouldn't see that root got passed, only a bunch of directories in root.I always add rm flags AFTER the paths. So then I double check the path after adding the flags.