rm -r directory

[mroussun51]

Hello,

I have just installed fedora 16. I want to rm to a directory. Specifically rm -r directory from root. I am familiar with Unix , Unix like, and linux unix like. I have not seen this behavior with other unices. I have looked at the manual page for syntax and it appears that I am syntactically correct. Here's what it is doing.

[CODE[root@alex opt]# ls
google jre1.6.0_31
[root@alex opt]# rm -r jre1.6.0_31
rm: descend into directory `jre1.6.0_31'? y
rm: descend into directory `jre1.6.0_31/man'? y
rm: remove directory `jre1.6.0_31/man/man1'? y
rm: remove directory `jre1.6.0_31/man'? y
rm: descend into directory `jre1.6.0_31/lib'? really, doesn't -r = recursively
][/CODE]

Thanks in advance!

[JamesNZ]

You have to run it with the 'f' force argument. So the syntax would be

rm -rf folder

[mroussun51]

To whom it interests,

I added the forcefully option and it worked. Recursively should have worked without forcefully removing the directory and subdirectories/files. I am leaving this open for comments. This is my first thread here. I am running KDE on fc 16. I just switched from Ubuntu. I can live with having to rm -rf <directory>.

Thanks again!

[smr54]

Not on a Fedora machine right now, but it's quite possible that rm is either aliased to something like rm -i (prompt before removing) or something is built into the Fedora version of either rm itself or possibly the shell's version of it. Many distributions (and systems) alias some things. For example, typing the command alias, I see that CentOS has put in several aliases for different types of ls. An ArchLinux box does the same thing (aliasing ls to ls --color=auto). A FreeBSD box has a couple of built in aliases as well.

I'm not sure if any of these are distro specific or shell specific, or shell specific for a particular distro.