English Idiom in Unix: Directory Recursively

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 9:17 AM, Xah Lee <xahlee at gmail.com> wrote:
> the context is this: In emacs directory manager (aka dired), when you
> call dired-do-delete on a directory, emacs prompts, this way:
> “Recursive delete of xx? (y or n)”

But in order to make your point (such as it is), you are ignoring the
fact that there are other uses of the term 'recurse' or 'recursive',
and consistency and clarity are important. I don't see emacs offering
me a chance to do a non-recursive delete; the only issue here seems to
be that it's explicit that it is going to destroy an entire branch of
the directory tree. If this is such a problem, grab the emacs sources
and change that string - it probably occurs in exactly one place in
the code. Voila! You now have The One True Perfect Emacs, the ultimate
text editor, because it no longer tells you that it's working
recursively.

*removes tongue from cheek after saying that last sentence*

Chris Angelico