Re: "git rm" seems to do recursive removal even without "-r"

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@crashcourse.ca>]

On Sat, 7 Oct 2017, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 07, 2017 at 03:43:43PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > >   -r
> > > 	Recursively remove the contents of any directories that match
> > > 	`<file>`.
> > >
> > > or something.
> >
> >   it's been a long week, so take this in the spirit in which it is
> > intended ... i think the "git rm" command and its man page should be
> > printed out, run through a paper shredder, then set on fire. i can't
> > remember the last time i saw such a thoroughly badly-designed,
> > badly-documented and non-intuitive utility.
> >
> >   i'm going to go watch football now and try to forget this horror.
>
> It sounds like the real issue here is that you are interpreting
> "recursively" to mean "globbing".  Your original complaint seemed to
> be a surprise that "git rm book/\*.asc" would delete all of the files
> in the directory "book" that ended in .asc, even without the -r flag.
>
> That's because the operation of matching *.asc is considered
> "globbing".  Now if there were directories whose name ended in .asc,
> then they would only be deleted if the -r flag is given.  Deleting
> directories and their contents is what is considered "recursive
> removal".
>
> That's not particularly surprising to me as a long-time Unix/Linux
> user/developer, since that's how things work in Unix/Linux:
>
> % touch 1.d 2.d ; mkdir 3.d 4.d
> % /bin/ls
> 1.d  2.d  3.d  4.d
> % rm -r *.d
> % touch 1.d 2.d ; mkdir 3.d 4.d
> % rm *.d
> rm: cannot remove '3.d': Is a directory
> rm: cannot remove '4.d': Is a directory
>
> I'm going to guess that you don't come from a Unix background?

  yeah, that must be it, i'm a newbie at linux. let's go with that.

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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