How do I remove a directory and all its subdirectories?

Question

I'm trying to learn some directory navigagtion with bash and all I know is that

rmdir directoryname

will remove the directory but not if it's containing something. Is there a way to force it to remove the subdirectories, even if they're not empty?

Answer 1

The following command will do it for you. Use caution though.

rm -rf directoryname