GNU bug report logs - #7985
Inconsistancy

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From: Eric Blake <eblake <at> redhat.com>
To: Tom Tijerina <swonsay <at> gmail.com>
Cc: 7985 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#7985: Inconsistancy
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2011 14:51:38 -0700

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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   eblake <at> redhat.com    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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