Re: rmdir fault

[Philip Rowlands]

On Sun, 23 Dec 2007, address@hidden wrote:

> I am trying to remove a bad install of VMWare by using;
>
> rmdir -v -p --ignore-fail-on-non-empty *
>
> (--ignore-fail-on-non-empty was found in MAN)
>
> The command line accepts the command without complaint,

It is a valid command line, but not an appropriate tool for the 
described purpose.

> then fails to remove the directories.

It's likely that the directories specified are not empty. rmdir only 
works on empty directories, because the underlying rmdir(2) system call 
does likewise.

> It also fails to remove 
> directories when * is replaced by a directory name.

Because the shell replaces the wildcard "*" by matching directory 
entries, this is to be expected.

Assuming you have permission to remove the files, the following will do 
what you want:

rm -v -rf -- *


Cheers,
Phil