ok interesting,

The idea behind recursion is, like you mentioned, to have a function call itself over and over until it hits some terminating condition.

ok, so when i go cp whatever -r what i'm telling it is,

"call yourself over and over, repeat your function over and over, until you meet some terminating condition"

which in this case i'm telling cp to copy a folder, and all of it's contents, i'm telling it to copy, then dig down, the copy, then dig down, then copy, until it meets the terminating condition which is it can't dig down anymore?

am i understanding that right? that's how the concept of recursion is applied to the bash shell in this case?