What is -f command and what does it do? [closed]

I Googled it and nothing came up which is weird, because I got the code to instill Chrome. So, what does actual does it do.

3 Answers

-f typically designates a switch or flag to a command aka option. For example,

stty -F /dev/ttyUSB0

Here -F tells stty to read options for a serial usb device, be it microcontroller or Raspberry

Flags are not standalone, they depend on each comman. So one command may or may not have it. Some commands don't use flags at all. Read man page for each command do know what options are available

You are probably talking about this:

sudo apt-get -f install

In this case it means:

-f, --fix-broken Fix. Attempt to correct a system with broken dependencies in place. This option, when used with install/remove, can omit any packages to permit APT to deduce a likely solution. Any package(s) that are specified must completely correct the problem. This option is sometimes necessary when running APT for the first time; APT itself does not allow broken package dependencies to exist on a system. It is possible that a system's dependency structure can be so corrupt as to require manual intervention. Use of this option together with -m may produce an error in some situations.

However, in the case of the remove command (rm):

rm -f, --force Ignore nonexistant files, and never prompt before removing.

So, -f means different things to different commands.

-f usually mean force a command, for example to force the remove of a folder with content ensted ofrm -r myfolder/we can force it by usingrm -rf myfolder/