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Comment by mcbain | Hacker News Reader

'sudo rmdir'? I don't think that does what they think it does.

For posterity, `rmdir` will only remove empty directories. The author presumably should have used `rm -rf`.

I think the command we're looking for is 'rm -R name_of_directory'

At least in GNU rm, -R and -r are synonymous. -f suppresses all prompts ("remove write-protected file ...?"), so the parent is also correct :)

Need to use `-f` when dealing with git repositories unfortunately.

Honestly, the proper command is not rm at all, because you can then have an "oh shit I forgot something" moment. I have learned (the hard way) to retain even an horribly broken repo, but shove it out of the way. Because disk is cheap, repeating work is expensive.

So that example should have been:

    cd ..
    mv fucking-git-repo-dir fucking-git-repo-dir.archived.$(date +%s)
    git clone https://some.github.url/fucking-git-repo-dir.git

  git fetch origin master && git reset --hard origin/master

imo

Or maybe

  sudo rm -rf /some/path --no-preserve-root

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