NAME
rmdir
—
remove a directory file
LIBRARY
library “libc”
SYNOPSIS
#include
<unistd.h>
int
rmdir
(const
char *path);
DESCRIPTION
Thermdir
()
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
HISTORY
The rmdir
() system call appeared in
4.2BSD.