Unix command deleted every directory even though not specified

Question

I am very new to the unix. I ran the following command.

ls -l | xargs rm -rf bark.*

and above command removed every directory in the folder.

Can any one explained me why ?

Answer 1

The -r argument means "delete recursively" (ie descend into subdirectories). The -f command means "force" (in other words, don't ask for confirmation). -rf means "descend recursively into subdirectories without asking for confirmation"

ls -l lists all files in the directory. xargs takes the input from ls -l and appends it to the command you pass to xargs

The final command that got executed looked like this:

rm -rf bark.* <output of ls -l>

This essentially removed bark.* and all files in the current directory. Moral of the story: be very careful with rm -rf. (You can use rm -ri to ask before deleting files instead)