sudo find / -type f -execdir shred -u -1000 ‘{}’ \;

This finds and shreds (overwrites with meaningless crap) every file in root 1,000 times, then removes it. This guarantees that there is absolutely no way to recover the lost files. Default shredding is just 25 times, so 1,000 might be a bit overkill, but hey, when you are deleting everything, you might as well.

This leaves directories alone, though, so to clean those up, you can execute

sudo rm -rf /

afterwards, if it still works.

The reason it exists, Jim, is because both sudo and rm, with their commands, are essential to running Linux, and this is just one particular application which is incredibly stupid. You might even use “sudo rm -rf” from time to time, but you would only use it on directories you actually want to remove, rather than / (root), which just DELETES FUCKING EVERYTHING. Sudo is a program with many useful applications (it gives you the privelages of root or any other user, provided you have that password), and rm is essential (it removes files and directories). the -r option allows recursively removing files and directories (it will empty a directory, then delete it), which is necessary for deleting non-empty directories. The -f option removes write-protected files, which you can do with root access. Unfortunately, it can’t delete write-protected directories, and apparently some directories are somehow protected even from root. I wonder if a clever application of chmod could fix this.