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Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 18:37:37 +0200
From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
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Helio Coelho Jr. - CompuLand Informatica writes:
>
>> Helio Coelho Jr. - CompuLand Informatica writes:
>>>
>>> Hi:
>>>
>>> There's a way to delete a directory tree,
>>
>> Yes.  rm -rf tree
>>
>
> Sorry!:
>
>  without having to delete all the archives inside it ?
>            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You don't understand.  In UNIX (and in DOS, for that matter), a
directory is a way to find files (which may be archives).  If you
delete the directory tree, you no longer have access to the files (or
archives).  If you were to delete the tree without deleting the
archives, you would not be able to access the files, but you would
also not be able to use the disk space.  For this reason, all
operating system developers (and the people at Microsoft) consider
this a Bad Thing.

In fact, there are ways to do exactly this with UNIX, but I don't want
to further confuse you with them at this stage, because I think I'm
completely misunderstanding what you want to do.  So, at the risk of
repeating myself:

>> Possibly.  But first I need to understand what you really want to do.
>> Can you give an example, please?

A couple of possibilities spring to mind:

1.  You want to delete only empty directories.
2.  You want to delete subdirectories, but not the files in the main
    directory.

Whichever it is, you haven't made your request clear.  Do you make a
distinction between archives and files?

Greg