Manual Pages  — RMDIR

rmdir – remove a directory file

LIBRARY SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION RETURN VALUES ERRORS SEE ALSO HISTORY

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

#include <unistd.h>

int
rmdir(const char *path);

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

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.

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 ‘.amp;’ and ‘..amp;’ 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 ‘.amp;’ 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.

The rmdir() system call appeared in BSD 4.2 .