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Recently, I was pair programming in Java with a less experienced partner when we came to a point where we needed to ensure that a collection of files was 'flattened,' containing no nested directories, in preparation for ingesting those files into a digital preservation system. I recognized it as a problem of recursion and was prepared to begin constructing a unit test for this while my partner expressed caution, and a belief that this was a difficult problem that would require much more planning to get right. It made me realize that the type of recursive processing I was envisioning could be difficult to initially wrap your mind around.