[ale] Stupid Question Time

[Michael Nolan]

(Sorry about the sleep deprived post last night, misspelled words are
always a dead giveaway the next morning...)

And thanks once again for responses, I know this stuff is simpleton
level for most of you....

I was reading in another thread about "root" (which was _way_ over my
head).... but I'd like to get a critique about the correctness of the
ugly commands below and my thought process in getting rid of the
offending empty dir's.

Also, is there any way to search the Ale.org archives other than using
Google advanced search or "[target] site:ale.org"

mike at Pappy:/media$ rmdir sdc1
rmdir: failed to remove `sdc1': Permission denied

mike at Pappy:/media$ ls -l
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 16 mike mike 4096 2012-02-02 10:15 2T_ext3
drwxrwxr-x  3 mike mike    0 2012-01-27 08:36 pogoplug
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 2012-01-13 21:02 sdc1
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 2012-01-13 21:03 sdc3
mike at Pappy:/media$

Obviously root owns the two dir's

so:

mike at Pappy:/media$ chown mike /media/sdc1
chown: changing ownership of `/media/sdc1': Operation not permitted

so:

mike at Pappy:/media$  sudo su

root at Pappy:/media#

root at Pappy:/media# rmdir sdc1
root at Pappy:/media# rmdir sdc3
root at Pappy:/media# exit
exit
mike at Pappy:/media$ ls
2T_ext3  pogoplug