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bug#32843: Feature request: rm -ir variant not asking about directories
From: |
Niels Möller |
Subject: |
bug#32843: Feature request: rm -ir variant not asking about directories |
Date: |
Wed, 26 Sep 2018 11:19:31 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/26.1 (berkeley-unix) |
I have a large directory tree where most but not all directories are
empty, and where I might want to keep a few of the existing files.
I can use rm -ir to get rm to ask me for each file if it should be
deleted. But it also asks questions like
rm: descend into directory 'foo'?
rm: remove directory 'foo'?
to which I'd always say yes (and then attempts to delete any non-empty
directory fails with a clear warning message).
It would be less tedious if the questions about directories were
suppressed. A reasonable command line flag might be
--interactive=non-dir
(If there are any entries which are niether files nor directories, e.g,
a named pipe, I'd want rm to ask, hence "non-dir" rather than "file").
Another variant which would be useful is to traverse a directory tree
and recursively delete all empty directories, without asking any
questions. Would make sense as a --recursive/-r flag to rmdir, rather
than a new option to rm.
I'm using GNU coreutils 8.28, which doesn't seem to have these features.
Regards,
/Niels
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- bug#32843: Feature request: rm -ir variant not asking about directories,
Niels Möller <=