I regularly use Team Foundation Server Power Tools to run a scorch, treeclean, uu, etc.. Most of these tools have an option for /recursive that is described as
/recursive Switch from one level of recursion to full recursion
I've scoured the internet and am still unsure what /recursive actually does. An example question that I've been unable to tell the difference between running "tfpt scorch" vs "tfpt scorch /recursive".
It seems like something that probably increases the time the tool takes to run while making it (somehow) better?
The /recursive switch is typically available on commands which affect version control folders or files. It is used to indicate that you want to perform the task on a specified folder and all of it's sub folders.
i.e. If you have a version control folder structure similar to $/MyTeamProject/MyBranch/MyFolder/SomeSubFolders and you have checked out all of the files. You know that you haven't changed all of the files so you could run tfpt uu $/MyTeamProject/MyBranch/MyFolder. This will undo the pending changes on the files that haven't changed but only for MyFolder, if you add /recursive it will undo changes in MyFolder and all of the targets sub folders as well