Sorry this reply is sooo late, but I’m leaving this response in hopes it can help someone down the line. I too, had this same issue. My issue was that I was in the todo directory itself when trying to recursively remove it. Removing it while being in it would be like dropping the floor out from underneath oneself, so I moved up a working directory to the main level (lingua-franca), and THEN tried the recursive removal of the todo directory with the code rm -r todo/* Hope this helps someone:)