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RMDIR(1) General Commands Manual RMDIR(1)

rmdirremove directories

rmdir [-p] directory ...

The rmdir utility removes the directory entry specified by each directory argument, provided it is empty.

Arguments are processed in the order given. In order to remove both a parent directory and a subdirectory of that parent, the subdirectory must be specified first so the parent directory is empty when rmdir tries to remove it.

The options are as follows:

Each directory argument is treated as a pathname of which all components will be removed, if they are empty, starting with the last most component. (See rm(1) for fully non-discriminant recursive removal.)

The rmdir utility exits with one of the following values:

0
Each directory argument referred to an empty directory and was removed successfully.
>0
An error occurred.

Remove the directory foobar, if it is empty:

$ rmdir foobar

Remove all directories up to and including cow, stopping at the first non-empty directory (if any):

$ rmdir -p cow/horse/monkey

rm(1), rmdir(2)

The rmdir utility is compliant with the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”) specification.

A rmdir command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX.

December 3, 2010 OpenBSD-5.5