rm -rf /

Is that better or worse than pushing a corrupt C-00000291*.sys?
- Better. I'm not even sure this is bad, per se. Presumably you're sure your present repo is trash.

Why learn how to use the entire swiss army knife when you can keep it closed to use it as a very small hammer?

I always use this command as $rm -fr and read it as remove, for real
- I do write it as rm -rf, but then my brain always continues singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight...
  
  singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight...
  "reeHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE--EE--Eaally ya-sure ya-wan-nadothaaat?"
  (rm -rf, rm -rf, rm -rf)
- it's for the French locale

Hey, sometimes you need to hose out the cruft.
Why yes, I do maintain a legacy application that still stores user files in Program Files in blatent violation of 15 years of Windows best practices and continues to be done contrary to my repeated advice, why do you ask?

Another one of this kind is rm -rf node_modules && npm install

Why not git clean -dxf?
- Nuke the reflog

What? Why would you need to do this? Is someone fucking with the .git directory?
- It does sometimes happen that something in there just breaks and isn't easy to recover. But it can also be a matter of (inexperienced) devs just deciding, fuck it, I won't try to merge it, I'll just copy my changes elsewhere and throw away the repo.
  
  I have never had git get into a state I cannot get out of. Even if that is a reset, checkout or clean. And those are very rare. How are people breaking things so often.
  Learn the tools you use daily, it saves you a lot of headache in thelong term.
  
  But it can also be a matter of (inexperienced) devs just deciding, fuck it, I won't try to merge it, I'll just copy my changes elsewhere and throw away the repo.
  Pretty sure that's actually it. Git has a learning curve and, for example, some naive rebase not working out as intended can be scary if you don't know what you're doing.
- People inexperienced with git can get stuck after doing some funky checkout / rebase stuff. If you don't know your way around git so well, I guess this is the obvious solution.
- I've been doing this yesterday. Not because Git broke, but since Intellij kept pulling invalid configs from the cache, and that was based on some kind of path identifier it seemed.
- Gradle!
  Fucking gradle. I do config stuff, rerun gradle error here, I fix the error rerun gradle: sth. Violation error.
  Ok intellij invalidate chaches and restart.... Still same error.
  Fine I'll do it again
  
  git add. git commit -m "stuff" git push rm -rf repo git clone repo
  
  You can probably use something like
  
  git clean -xdf
  To get rid of all the artifacts not tracked by git, in this case it's virtually the same as deleting the repo and re-cloning it.
  NOTE: Make sure everyhing is staged, otherwise that data is gone

I guess that's probably easier than learning how to wipe your ass.

I feel dumb: Why git rm -rf and not rm -rf? O.o
- git rm -rf is only usable within the scope of the git repository and removes files in the staging area and working directory but doesnt affect untracked files or .git. rm -rf affects everything. For this case rm -rf probably would be the better option
  edit: did a quick edit on the meme to change it to rm -rf since it makes more sense
  
  rm - rf is the only version that makes sense, since the only reason to delete and re-clone is to recover from an unexpected .git/ state, and git rm won't remove that.
  
  Thanks
  
  Never heard of it, makes total sense, but I'd guess 95% of developers just nuke the directory raw.