I assume OP stands for Original Poster (correct me if I'm wrong). Anyway, I'm the Original Poster of "rmdir when directory is not empty" I've gotten an incredible education from asking this question ... 1. man rmdir didn't answer my question because it was a truncated man page, something I didn't even know existed 2. The full man page for rmdir wouldn't have solved my problem if I had run it because most people suggested a solution using rm instead of rmdir. The RTFM advice wouldn't have helped if I was reading the Wrong FM. 3. RTFM advocates may have forgotten what it's like to be a newbie or a newbie to some areas. I read man pages a lot, but a lot of what I read makes no sense to me. That's why I go to discussion boards. 4. I asked my question assuming rmdir was half my solution. The suggested solutions ... rm -fR directoryname and # Delete the files. su - -c "find /path/to/dirName -type f -exec rm -f {} \;" # Delete the directory paths. su - -c "rmdir -p /path/to/dirName" showed me I should stick to a more general description of my problem (How do I delete non-empty directories?)