rmdir - delete a directory

Infelicities in the protocol underlying NFS can cause the unexpected disappearance of directories which are still being used.

rmdir() deletes a directory, which must be empty.

EACCES Write access to the directory containing pathname was not allowed, or one of the directories in the path prefix of pathname did not allow search permission. (See also path_resolution(7).) EBUSYpathname is currently in use by the system or some process that prevents its removal. On Linux, this means pathname is currently used as a mount point or is the root directory of the calling process. EFAULTpathname points outside your accessible address space. EINVALpathname has . as last component. ELOOP Too many symbolic links were encountered in resolving pathname. ENAMETOOLONGpathname was too long. ENOENT A directory component in pathname does not exist or is a dangling symbolic link. ENOMEM Insufficient kernel memory was available. ENOTDIRpathname, or a component used as a directory in pathname, is not, in fact, a directory. ENOTEMPTYpathname contains entries other than . and .. ; or, pathname has .. as its final component. POSIX.1 also allows EEXIST for this condition. EPERM The directory containing pathname has the sticky bit (S_ISVTX) set and the process's effective user ID is neither the user ID of the file to be deleted nor that of the directory containing it, and the process is not privileged (Linux: does not have the CAP_FOWNER capability). EPERM The filesystem containing pathname does not support the removal of directories. EROFSpathname refers to a directory on a read-only filesystem.

POSIX.1-2001, SVr4, 4.3BSD.

Standard C library (libc, -lc)

rmdir - delete a directory

On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set to indicate the error.

rm(1), rmdir(1), chdir(2), chmod(2), mkdir(2), rename(2), unlink(2), unlinkat(2) Linux man-pages 6.9.1 2024-05-02 rmdir(2)

POSIX.1-2008.