NAME¶

rmdir — remove a directory file

LIBRARY¶

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS¶

#include <unistd.h> int
rmdir(const char *path);

DESCRIPTION¶

The rmdir() system call removes a directory file whose name is given by path. The directory must not have any entries other than ‘.’ and ‘..’.

RETURN VALUES¶

The rmdir() function returns the value 0 if successful; 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 255 characters, or an entire path name exceeded 1023 characters.

[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 link to be removed.

[EPERM]

The directory to be removed has its immutable, undeletable or append-only flag set, see the chflags(2) manual page for more information.

[EPERM]

The parent directory of the directory to be removed has its immutable or append-only flag set.

[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.

[EINVAL]

The last component of the path is ‘.’ or ‘..’.

[EBUSY]

The directory to be removed is the mount point for a mounted file system.

[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]

The path argument points outside the process's allocated address space.

SEE ALSO¶

mkdir(2), unlink(2)

HISTORY¶

The rmdir() system call appeared in 4.2BSD.