[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.