(Probably) trivial question about rmdir

Question

I hope this isn't too trivial, but for some reason I can't get a simple command to execute.

I'm writing a file manipulation script and I have several directories called test, test2, etc each containing several files.
I type:
rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty test*

I get a prompt with no error messages as if the command executed cleanly. I ls the directory I'm in and get:
test test2 test3 test4

I know I'm missing something obvious; anyone have a clue what it is? Yes, I'm in the parent directory. Yes, the option is typed correctly -- I checked the manpage twice.

Answer 1

rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty does exactly what it says on the tin, it ignores failures when not empty; i.e., it does nothing.

An alternate solutions to your problem would be rm -r or rm -rf , using -f in order to "ignore nonexistent files, never prompt".

Answer 2

rmdir removes empty directories. It does not remove non-empty directories. There is no way to make it remove non-empty directories.

Answer 3

rmdir does not remove non-empty folders at all.

Use rm -rf ./test* for this. But be very careful about the path you give rm