How to Delete Taskwarrior Recurrent Tasks

I’m trying out Taskwarrior as CLI task manager, because it can be paired with my Letsdo for time tracking and it’s very flexible, but today I got stuck with a bunch of “recurring tasks”.

Taskwarrior lets you set a task “recurring”, that is, it shows up at some time intervals and you are supposed to set it to “DONE” every time, which is good to take into account things I do on a monthly base, but it turned out the be faulty for daily activities at work. During this Christmas holidays, in fact, the daily recurring tasks accumulated in a tragic manner, so I decided to get rid of them altogether, but how?

Taskwarrior has the following CLI format

$ task [filter] [command]

then I first tried the simplest command

$ task recur delete

which was suppose to delete all recurring tasks. However this acts also on the hundreds of already completed task, and being Taskwarrior (dutily) pedantic, after 5 minutes confirming that “yes indeed I know this task is recurring and I do want to delete it”, I stopped and summoned The Internet. Which worked pretty well

So, thanks to “dustymabe” on StackOverflow, I know that I shall delete only the “original” recurring task.

$ task all +PARENT
ID St UUID     Age Done Project Tags R Due        Description
60 R  6524a8cd 5w       hsw          R 2020-11-30 timetracker
36 R  6cff76be 11w      hsw          R 2020-10-14 daily task review
35 R  ad77b550 12w      hsw          R 2020-10-12 code-review

$ task 35 36 60 delete