Here's part of this xkcd comic strip where the idea is that the author can't write a sort program so he adds code to delete all files
system("rm -rf ./");
system("rm -rf ~/*");
system("rm -rf /");
AFAIK the canonical way to delete everything is to rm / so that everything starting from root is deleted. Here this is the last command and the two commands before that try to rm the current directory and the contents of the home directory.
Why not just rm /?
If you start at the very top, it's possible that you'll wipe out something that rm (or some other critical part of the system) needs to continue, and the evilness will be left incomplete.
These commands will make sure that at least the cwd and the user's home directory are gone before going nuclear.
rm -rf / from an interactive session your shell should be still working
Mar 14, 2013 at 14:38
rms will fail on the last command with rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on ‘/’; other than that rm doesn't require access to any resource after initialization. A reason for using multiple commands might be that the user might have different access permissions to those directories.
Mar 14, 2013 at 14:38
rm --no-preserve-root / for this to actually work
Just to show increasing levels of destructiveness: Delete the current directory, then $HOME, finally destroy all.
