linuxmemes

I don't think there's any reason to use rmdir unless you write (Ba)sh scripts, and you want to make sure that the directory is indeed empty. Just use rm -r.

Also note that you can use rmdir -p this/is/some/path to remove all nested directories including the parent (this here). But this will only work if there's exactly one directory per parent directory, and the last directory doesn't have any files (including directories). This might be helpful for some scripts.

rmdir -r isn't a thing, because that would invalidate the reason this command exists.

Reminds me of a little annoyance I have with cat and ls. Yeah they technically do different things, one is for files and one is for directories. But so often I just find myself wishing I could use one command for both. Like making cat directory act as ls. Maybe I'm the only one who feels that way.

On Linux, rm can delete empty directories with -d too, not just with -r.

rmdir is the counterpart to mkdir, which creates empty directories, so of course it can only remove empty directories. After all mkdir can’t create full directories either. There however is rmdir -p as a counterpart to mkdir -p, so if there is something in the directory, you can use that, as long as the something is an empty directory.