NAME
rmdir
—
remove a directory file
SYNOPSIS
#include
<unistd.h>
int
rmdir
(const
char *path);
DESCRIPTION
rmdir
()
removes a directory file whose name is given by path.
The directory must not have any entries other than
‘.
’ and
‘..
’.
There is no
rmdirat
()
function; to remove a directory with a path relative to the directory
associated with a file descriptor use the
unlinkat(2) function with the AT_REMOVEDIR
flag.
RETURN VALUES
Upon successful completion, the value 0 is returned; otherwise the value -1 is returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the error.
ERRORS
The named file is removed unless:
- [
ENOTDIR
] - A component of the path is not a directory.
- [
ENAMETOOLONG
] - A component of a pathname exceeded
NAME_MAX
characters, or an entire pathname (including the terminating NUL) exceededPATH_MAX
bytes. - [
ENOENT
] - The named directory does not exist.
- [
ELOOP
] - Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the pathname.
- [
ENOTEMPTY
] - The named directory contains files other than
‘
.
’ and ‘..
’ in it. - [
EACCES
] - Search permission is denied for a component of the path prefix.
- [
EACCES
] - Write permission is denied on the directory containing the directory to be removed.
- [
EPERM
] - The directory containing the directory to be removed is marked sticky, and neither the containing directory nor the directory to be removed are owned by the effective user ID.
- [
EPERM
] - The directory to be removed or the directory containing it has its immutable or append-only flag set (see chflags(2)).
- [
EBUSY
] - The directory to be removed is the mount point for a mounted file system.
- [
EINVAL
] - The last path element of the directory to be removed consists of
‘
.
’. - [
EIO
] - An I/O error occurred while deleting the directory entry or deallocating the inode.
- [
EROFS
] - The directory entry to be removed resides on a read-only file system.
- [
EFAULT
] - path points outside the process's allocated address space.
SEE ALSO
STANDARDS
rmdir
() function conforms to
IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”).
HISTORY
The rmdir
() function call appeared in
4.2BSD.