D'oh

Best I can tell they were trying to remove all packages that depended on a specified package, but fucked up the syntax?

Apk del --purge removes a package with its dependencies. Rather than specify the package directly, they've provided the output of one command piped through another. The first command is apk info -R which would in theory give the reverse dependencies of a package, if they'd given one. The second command is an awk statement that just grabs only the first column of each line that gets piped into it. I'm not sure why it would take 60 minutes to resolve though, since I'm pretty sure apk info -R with no package specified would produce no usable output. Also, ctrl-c exists.

it was late. i "thought" i might free up space inside that alpine lxc. i wasnt. i just like a moran wiped all the apps. then went to bed. i cant even recall what i thought would prevent this from destroying everything. at least it wasnt a closed OS...that would have cost me 51yrs.