Warning:
The rm command could potentially destroy your whole filesystem.
Use with caution.

rm is a destructive terminal command. It’s used to permanently delete files and directories, forever, with no concept of a ‘trash can’.

Destroy a file:

rm someFile.txt

That’s it. Its gone. No warning. No confirmation. No Undo’s!

You can use glob patterns to drill down into directories and delete all files with a paticular extension.

rm src/assets/**/*.css

This will delete all .css files which are within the src/assets directory and all of its sub-directories.

And if you want to delete all files within a directory:

rm src/assets/*

Or simply remove a directory and everything it contains:

rm src/assets

And when you want to destroy an entire directory tree, sub directories and all it’s files, you can add the -r (recursive) and -f (force) flags — usually combined as -rf. Force is used here to ignore warning which are shown for certain special files.

This is particularly useful when dealing with node_modules.

rm -rf node_modules

Poof! All gone. Forever.

I repeat, take caution when using rm!