English Idiom in Unix: Directory Recursively

[Xah Lee]

On May 22, 4:32 pm, Chris Angelico <ros... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 9:17 AM, Xah Lee <xah... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > the context is this: In emacs directory manager (aka dired), when you
> > call dired-do-delete on a directory, emacs prompts, this way:
> > “Recursive delete of xx? (y or n)”
>
> But in order to make your point (such as it is), you are ignoring the
> fact that there are other uses of the term 'recurse' or 'recursive',
> and consistency and clarity are important. I don't see emacs offering
> me a chance to do a non-recursive delete; the only issue here seems to
> be that it's explicit that it is going to destroy an entire branch of
> the directory tree. If this is such a problem, grab the emacs sources
> and change that string - it probably occurs in exactly one place in
> the code. Voila! You now have The One True Perfect Emacs, the ultimate
> text editor, because it no longer tells you that it's working
> recursively.
>
> *removes tongue from cheek after saying that last sentence*
>
> Chris Angelico

why don't you file a bug report? In GNU Emacs 23.2, it's under the
Help menu. I suppose it's the same in other emacs distro.

 Xah