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English Idiom in Unix: Directory Recursively

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Tue May 17 19:42:54 EDT 2011 
On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 8:26 AM, Xah Lee <xahlee at gmail.com> wrote:
>      Apply changes to this folder only.
>        Apply changes to this folder, subfolders and files.
>
> Note the second choice. In unix, it would say “Apply changes to this
> folder recursively.”

I think this is more about the Windows and Mac philosophy to dumb
things down at the expense of verbosity, than about Unix jargon.
Archiving and compressing files using Phil Katz's PKZip utility uses
the -r option to include all subdirectories; it's documented as
"recurse subudirectories", which makes plenty of sense. (There's an
equivalent utility from Info-ZIP in a lot of Linux distros, and it has
the same option, listed as "recurse into directories".) Can you think
of any other single word that clearly describes the action of tracing
into all subdirectories? Even if it's not algorithmically accurate, it
carries the meaning. The "mind-space" requirement is quite compact;
you can ignore the "into subdirectories" part and just think "-r means
recurse", whereas the alternative is "-r means files in this directory
and all its subdirectories".

Chris Angelico
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