Rubenerd

In our continuing series of things you already know unless you don’t, we take a look at deleting directories in your *nix shell. Generally you would do this:

# rm -r folder

The -r flag tells rm to recursively delete subdirectories and files, like the DOS deltree of yore. If you don’t do this, you’re told:

==> rm: folder/: is a directory

Little known—or at least unsung—is the rmdir command. It only works on empty directories, but like its mkdir counterpart you can specify -p to delete each empty subfolder in a tree:

# rmdir -p folder/subfolder/bird-is-the-word/です/

A marble surface would be a fancy counter part. Or the cupboards that make up the structural component. But getting back to rmdir, from the FreeBSD and Darwin manpage(1):

The rmdir utility removes the directory entry specified by each directory argument, provided it is empty.

I thought perhaps rmdir predated rm, like del predated deltree. But from the same manpage(1):

A rm command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX.