OK...trying to install wine, i screwed up and want to start over. I want to start over all the way from the beginning. So i go to delete the source tree so i can re-tar the tarball file and start from scratch. when i try to delete the wine20031016 directory in KDE, it doesn't work, telling me that i dont have the permissions to do it. when i use Konsole, logged in as su, i tried using the rmdir and the rm commands, both of which returned the same error: "cannot remove directory wine-20031016: file is a directory"

What am i supposed to do here?

I believe "rmdir" deletes empty folders and "rm -r" removes folders with things in them.

-JMagi

In Linux, like its Unix predecessors, you can't use rmdir or rm on a directory that still contains files, or other directories. The easiest thing to do is tell rm to remove files recursively. Open up a console, become root if necessary, and do:

rm -rf /path/to/wine-20031016

Also, in order to cut down on the number of times you have to become root, it may be good to un-tar and compile programs as a normal user. Set a directory somewhere that the user has write permission to, and do all your compiling there. That way, you don't need to become root to delete an old source tree. You can also run configure, make, and many other things as a normal user - then just become root to 'make install'.

p.s. - be very careful with the 'rm -rf' command, especially when you are root! If you rm -rf the wrong directory, you might wipe out your hard drive. The '-f' means 'force', which means it won't ask for any confirmation about deleting things. All the more reason to do most of that stuff as a normal user, if possible.

Wow, thanks that did it. I appreciate the incredibly fast reply