Removing directories

[Mikhail Teterin]

When trying to remove a directory using either rm -r or rmdir I get
<dir_name>: is a directory

rm -r, however, removes all the directories on the lower level...

The system is FreeBSD 2.0-RELEASE

Thank you,
-mi
--
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[Stefan Esser]

In article <3pd8hc$t...@news.bu.edu>, m...@cs.bu.edu (Mikhail Teterin) writes:
|> When trying to remove a directory using either rm -r or rmdir I get
|> <dir_name>: is a directory
|>
|> rm -r, however, removes all the directories on the lower level...

You are using

$ rmdir dirname/

with a tailing slash "/", probably due to
file name completion in bash or some other
shell puting the slash at the end of an
inclomplete path name.

Try

$ rmdir dirname

instead. Immediate success guaranteed :)

Regards,
--
Stefan Esser Internet: <s...@ZPR.Uni-Koeln.DE>
Zentrum fuer Paralleles Rechnen Tel: +49 221 4706017
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[Mike Digdon]

Mikhail Teterin (m...@cs.bu.edu) wrote:
: When trying to remove a directory using either rm -r or rmdir I get
: <dir_name>: is a directory

: rm -r, however, removes all the directories on the lower level...

: The system is FreeBSD 2.0-RELEASE

When you are removing these directories, is there a trailing / after the
directory name? If you do, then am rm -r, rmdir or an mv won't work.

I use SunOS at work, FreeBSD at home, and the shell I use on both systems is
bash. I'm not running similar versions of bash (1.14.2 at work, 1.14.3 at
home), but SunOS allows me to leave on the trailing / while BSD does not.
Perhaps it is a change that needs to be made to rm and mv.