Laurel Fan

Many unix commands have an option to recursively apply a command to a directory and its files/subdirectories. Almost always the option is -R. Sometimes you can use little -r as well, and sometimes little -r does something different.

command	little -r	Big -R
ls	reverse sort	recursive
rm	recursive	recursive
chmod	mess things up	recursive
svn	revision	recursive
grep	recursive	recursive

I’m in the habit of using little -r for rm and grep. Most examples I see use this, not sure if it’s because it’s one less key to press or if historically -R didn’t work. But this means I’m also in the habit of using -r for chmod, which will print an error message and also make my directory unlistable. So I should probably get in the habit of using -R…

(I tried this on OSX, FreeBSD, and Linux)