Subject: Re: bug#7985: Inconsistancy

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2011 14:51:38 -0700

On 02/03/2011 04:22 PM, Tom Tijerina wrote:
> I have a friend I'm trying to get into learning Linux, not wanting to
> hand feed him every command I've instructed him to use man when he get
> stuck or needs help on how to use a command. 
> 
> He ran man rm and it says at the top its for removing files OR
> directories. That is not correct as it does not give you any information
> for removing directories. I assumed it may be an option of some sort but
> I have not found it in the man page. Is this an oversight? 

Thanks for the report, however, the sentence is correct as-is.

$ mkdir dir
$ rm -r dir

successfully removes the directory dir.

The -r option already has this text:

  -r, -R, --recursive   remove directories and their contents recursively

About the only thing that might be worth doing is rewording from one
accurate sentence to another, but I don't know of anything better than
this, and prefer the terseness of the original sentence (man pages are
generated from the --help output, and --help should be a complete
overview while still being concise):

rm - remove files or directory hierarchies

-- 
Eric Blake   [email-masked]    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org