Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!aioe.org!feeder.news-service.com!cyclone03.ams2.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!npeersf01.ams.highwinds-media.com!newsfe20.ams2.POSTED!00000000!not-for-mail From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Thunderbird/3.1.10 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.python,alt.usage.english,comp.unix.programmer Subject: Re: English Idiom in Unix: Directory Recursively References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Lines: 12 NNTP-Posting-Host: 86.20.254.174 X-Complaints-To: http://netreport.virginmedia.com X-Trace: newsfe20.ams2 1305875318 86.20.254.174 (Fri, 20 May 2011 07:08:38 UTC) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 07:08:38 UTC Organization: virginmedia.com Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 08:07:08 +0100 Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.lisp:3573 comp.lang.python:5831 comp.unix.programmer:625 > AFAICS what emacs calls "recursive delete" is what the ordinary person > would simply call "delete". Presumably the non-recursive delete is > called simply "delete" but is actually something more complicated than > delete, and you're supposed to know what that is. > The "non-recursive delete" would be simply calling the rmdir() system call, which of course fails if the directory is non-empty. One has to empty the directory of its contents, if any, first. That, of course, involves potentially recursively removing any subdirectories, in exactly the same way.