On Tue, 2005-12-20 at 16:06 -0500, John Kebbel wrote: > My original posting for Re: rmdir when directory is not empty began... > "The man page for rmdir left more questions than it answered." I cropped > that line out of my email so I could get straight to the point. Now that > I know we have a vocal RTFM crowd here, I'll make sure I NEVER again > forget to mention I read the man first. > > I ran man rmdir > rmdir.txt so I could paste it here to show you why the > man page left me puzzled. First, the only option that seems to address > the issue is the option --ignore-fail-on-non-empty, which I typed out in > full and also tried as just -i without results. (Maybe I typed it wrong > one or both times.) Anyway, it wasn't till I copied and pasted here that > I noticed that I have a truncated manual, that the full docs are in some > other file. > > > > RMDIR(1) User Commands > RMDIR(1) > > > > NAME > rmdir - remove empty directories > > SYNOPSIS > rmdir [OPTION]... DIRECTORY... > > DESCRIPTION > Remove the DIRECTORY(ies), if they are empty. > > --ignore-fail-on-non-empty > > ignore each failure that is solely because a directory > is non-empty What it means by this is that it won't report errors about the non-empty directories. It doesn't mean it will actually delete the non-empty directories. > SEE ALSO > The full documentation for rmdir is maintained as a Texinfo > manual. If the info and rmdir programs are properly installed at > your site, the command info coreutils rmdir should give you access to > the complete manual. "info coreutils rmdir" refers to using rm for recursively deleting non-empty directories. Paul.
