The command rm -rf ./ does not do anything in a directory full of sub directories and files. Why so? Isn't -r supposed to go recursive?
To add more confusion, it even prints an error message suggesting that it is traversing the directory:
rm: refusing to remove ‘.’ or ‘..’ directory: skipping ‘./’
The rm command refuses to delete the directory by the '.' name. If you instead use the full path name it should delete the directory recursively, i.e. rm -rf `pwd`.
It is also possible to delete the directory if it is the current directory.
[testuser@testhost] /tmp$ mkdir ff
[testuser@testhost] /tmp$ cd ff
[testuser@testhost] /tmp/ff$ touch a b c
[testuser@testhost] /tmp/ff$ rm -rf ./
rm: cannot remove directory: ‘./’
[testuser@testhost] /tmp/ff$ ls
a b c
[testuser@testhost] /tmp/ff$ rm -rf /tmp/ff
[testuser@testhost] /tmp/ff$ ls
[testuser@testhost] /tmp/ff$ ls ../ff
ls: cannot access ../ff: No such file or directory
[testuser@testhost] /tmp/ff$ cd ..
[testuser@testhost] /tmp$ ls ff
ls: cannot access ff: No such file or directory
From info rm:
Any attempt to remove a file whose last file name component is .' or ..' is rejected without any prompting.
You cannot remove the current directory because then the current directory would become invalid.
First, change out of the directory you want to remove (e.g. cd ..) and then remove the desired directory using its full or relative pathname from outside.
rm to do something it cannot do. Not only is rm not doing it, but it's telling you why not with an informative error message. To delete a directory (recursively or not), your current working directory should be outside of that directory.
rm -rf .