Mac OSX Recovery Mode Terminal: rm -rf doesn't delete anything

Using -f hides errors. Try running the command without the f option: rm -r ….

Without the actual error message, I can guess what the problem is: you're trying to delete files by providing a path you expect to the files but do not match the actual path.

When you're booted into Recovery, the Recovery environment is mounted at /, so paths like /Users are actually pointing to the Recovery HD. For example, instead of

rm -rf /Users/…

you should prepend to your paths the correct path to the volume

rm -rf /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users/…

where Macintosh HD is your startup disk volume. Try ls /Volumes to see what's available.

When you boot in single user mode, the disk is mounted read-only. As others have pointed out, running rm with -f can hide errors.

Prior to running rm, try setting the mount point to read write using

mount -uw /