English Idiom in Unix: Directory Recursively

[rantingrick]

On May 26, 6:12 am, Chris Angelico <ros... at gmail.com> wrote:
> I just conducted a rapid poll of a non-technical userbase.
>
> (Okay, I just asked my sister who happens to be sitting here. But
> she's nontechnical.)
>
> She explained "recursive" as "it repeats until it can't go any
> further". I think that's a fair, if not perfectly accurate,
> explanation.

Yes but understanding of this sort is very general ESPECIALLY in the
case of destroying data!

What are the limits of the recursion? What forces can act on the
recursion to stop it? If (for example) I know that a "while loop" will
continue forever until "something" stops it then i really don't know
enough about while loops to start using them safely do i? I need to
know what a "break" will do or god forbid what if an exception is
thrown? What about if a condition is explicitly passed? I need to know
how to interpret the condition and it's consequences. Crikey, this is
getting complicated 8-O!

PS: Of course i could just cross my fingers, run the code, and hope
for the best but i'm not a Perl hacker.