[ajanuary]

Deleting the first directory seems like a harder problem than deleting a folder called .adobe.

[mikeash]

I don't know about that. It's harder to do it right, but they probably didn't bother with doing it right.

For example:

    ls / | head -n 1 | xargs rm -rf

[ajanuary]

That's easier than

    rm -rf /.adobe

?

My point being that things indicate a more interesting problem they were trying to solve than just deleting a directory. What that actually was, and how that lead to such an awful solution, would be interesting to know.

[mikeash]

I agree it's pretty far fetched. I'd love to know what the real story is too.

[kevb]

I wonder if it was something like .adobe-A3DF0910 that they were targeting, so they couldn't completely hard code the path and neglected to hardcode the prefix. Or maybe it was a purely randomly named directory without any prefix.

[mirimir]

Maybe they were targeting .adobe* in home, and assumed that it'd be first, but didn't account for that possibility that it'd be missing. That would have been insane, I admit. But we do know that initial dot directories were getting hit.