English Idiom in Unix: Directory Recursively

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

> 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.