Re: "git rm" seems to do recursive removal even without "-r"

From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Oct 7, 2017, 21:05 UTC
Message-ID: <20171007210500.s3s5q53qihtf2s32@thunk.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.21.1710071541430.15964@localhost.localdomain>

On Sat, Oct 07, 2017 at 03:43:43PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> >   -r
> > 	Recursively remove the contents of any directories that match
> > 	`<file>`.
> >
> > or something.
> 
>   it's been a long week, so take this in the spirit in which it is
> intended ... i think the "git rm" command and its man page should be
> printed out, run through a paper shredder, then set on fire. i can't
> remember the last time i saw such a thoroughly badly-designed,
> badly-documented and non-intuitive utility.
> 
>   i'm going to go watch football now and try to forget this horror.

It sounds like the real issue here is that you are interpreting "recursively" to mean "globbing". Your original complaint seemed to be a surprise that "git rm book/\*.asc" would delete all of the files in the directory "book" that ended in .asc, even without the -r flag.

That's because the operation of matching *.asc is considered "globbing". Now if there were directories whose name ended in .asc, then they would only be deleted if the -r flag is given. Deleting directories and their contents is what is considered "recursive removal".

That's not particularly surprising to me as a long-time Unix/Linux user/developer, since that's how things work in Unix/Linux:

% touch 1.d 2.d ; mkdir 3.d 4.d % /bin/ls 1.d 2.d 3.d 4.d % rm -r *.d % touch 1.d 2.d ; mkdir 3.d 4.d % rm *.d rm: cannot remove '3.d': Is a directory rm: cannot remove '4.d': Is a directory

I'm going to guess that you don't come from a Unix background?

        	     	   	    - Ted