Re: Could we have a flag to tell us which directories were actually removed?

[Reuben Thomas]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2007, Jim Meyering wrote:

> Reuben Thomas <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I just had a situation where this would have been useful. I tried -v
> > --ignore-fail-on-non-empty, but of course it told me about every
> > directory it processed, which is fine, but not what I wanted.
>
> Why add a new option?

In this case, I don't see a good way of getting the same information. The 
best way I could come up with that was short enough for command-line use was 
use find to find directories with only 2 symlinks to them, but of course 
that only works on some filing systems.

> While adding a new rmdir option may look simple, there are larger 
> implications that make it so you'd have to provide significant 
> justification.

What are they in this case? Seems to me that it's just printing a diagnostic 
on an already-existing code path (the one where the directory is unlinked), 
and hence has no major code burden. Of course there's the usual overhead of 
documentation &c...

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