Suppose you have a file that you want to delete*, but don’t want to break out a command line interface to do so. You can delete the file directly from GitHub.com.
Next you can commit the changes to delete the file to the commit.
*Note that this Delete this file button only removes the file from this commit on this particular branch moving forward. It won’t delete the file in any previous commit history or other branches (until they are merged and only from this commit moving forward).
If you need to permanently delete a file (or even if don’t, you still need to read this doc if you haven’t already), check out GitHub’s documentation on Removing Sensitive Data.
Why no -r delete option (read: why no recursive delete)? The shortest answer is this is how Git works as a Distributed Version Control System. If one or more people have cloned your repo, and if anyone changes their Git repo history, the repos won’t be compatible anymore (there might still be a way but it’s way beyond my skills as of today). And note how I’m saying this is how Git works (instead of “how GitHub works”). This is Git functionality. If you want to read more for possible options, check out the git-scm documentation on rewriting history.
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