What is the command for deleting a directory in command line?

If you've ever used the command line in Linux, Mac OS, or Windows, you may have wondered what the command for deleting a directory is. As it turns out, there are several commands you can use to delete a directory and its contents. In this article, we'll look at some of the most commonly used commands for deleting directories.

The primary command you can use to delete a directory is "rm" (or "rmdir" if you are running Windows). This command followed by the path of the directory will delete it and everything inside of it. To show you how this works, here's an example:

$ rm -r directory/

In this example, we're deleting the directory located at "directory/". The "-r" flag indicates that we want to recursively delete the contents of this directory (in other words, delete all subdirectories and files inside it). It's important to note that this command does not ask for confirmation before deleting the contents so be sure you type the correct path when entering this command.

Another commonly used command for deleting directories is "find . -type f -delete". This command follows slightly different syntax than what was used in our first example. The "-type f" flag dictates that we only want to find and delete files (rather than subdirectories) within our specified path. Here is an example:

$ find . -type f -delete folder/

In this example, we are deleting all files located in the folder named "folder/". Again, like with our previous example, this command does not ask for confirmation before deletes so be sure to double check your entry each time you use it.

Finally, there are also two built-in commands dedicated entirely to removing directories: "rmdir" and "rmdir --force". These two commands are very similar but they differ in that rmdir --force will also delete anything inside of a specified subdirectory while rmdir will only remove empty ones. When using either of these commands, be sure to append either with a directory path when entering into your console window as seen here:

$ rmdir mydirectory/

$ rmdir --force mydirectory/

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