WARNING DON'T TRY IT AT HOME!! What does “sudo rm -rf” means? “sudo” means that you’re running that command as the super user. If you’re logged in as root, you wouldn’t need to use sudo. You don’t need to use sudo for the rm command, but you may need it depending on what kind of privileges your normal user has. To avoid the prompt you’d get asking you if you want to remove the file, you can use the “–force” flag, or “-f”. So, if you run: sudo rm -f notes.txt The file will be deleted right after running the command, and you won’t have to confirm anything. The “-r” (–recursive) flag is used to recursively delete everything in a directory (folder). The most common usage is to delete a directory along with everything that’s in that directory. In short, the sudo rm -rf / command deletes everything in the root directory, which basically breaks your whole system. We’ll explain the command in detail below. If you don’t know what it means or what it does – you should not run it. In the below figure The Linux File System Hierarchy: