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.
[EINTEGRITY]: Corrupted data was detected while reading from the file system.
[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.

HISTORY

The rmdir() system call appeared in 4.2BSD.