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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | STANDARDS | HISTORY | BUGS | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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rmdir(2) System Calls Manual rmdir(2)
rmdir - delete a directory
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
#include <unistd.h>
int rmdir(const char *path);
rmdir() deletes a directory, which must be empty.
On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno
is set to indicate the error.
EACCES Write access to the directory containing path was not
allowed, or one of the directories in the path prefix of
path did not allow search permission. (See also
path_resolution(7).)
EBUSY path is currently in use by the system or some process that
prevents its removal. On Linux, this means path is
currently used as a mount point or is the root directory of
the calling process.
EFAULT path points outside your accessible address space.
EINVAL path has . as last component.
ELOOP Too many symbolic links were encountered in resolving path.
ENAMETOOLONG
path was too long.
ENOENT A directory component in path does not exist or is a
dangling symbolic link.
ENOMEM Insufficient kernel memory was available.
ENOTDIR
path, or a component used as a directory in path, is not,
in fact, a directory.
ENOTEMPTY
path contains entries other than . and ..; or, path has ..
as its final component. POSIX.1 also allows EEXIST for
this condition.
EPERM The directory containing path 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 path does not support the removal
of directories.
EROFS path refers to a directory on a read-only filesystem.
POSIX.1-2008.
POSIX.1-2001, SVr4, 4.3BSD.
Infelicities in the protocol underlying NFS can cause the
unexpected disappearance of directories which are still being
used.
rm(1), rmdir(1), chdir(2), chmod(2), mkdir(2), rename(2),
unlink(2), unlinkat(2)
This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
user-space interface documentation) project. Information about
the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.15.tar.gz
fetched from
⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
2025-08-11. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Linux man-pages 6.15 2025-05-17 rmdir(2)
Pages that refer to this page: rmdir(1), fanotify_mark(2), F_NOTIFY(2const), mkdir(2), syscalls(2), unlink(2), remove(3), cpuset(7), mount_namespaces(7), signal-safety(7), symlink(7), mount(8)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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