rmdir(2)

rmdir2

Remove a directory file

Usage

#include <unistd.h>

int

rmdir(const char *path);

Overview

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

Return values

A 0 is returned if the remove succeeds; otherwise a -1 is returned and an error code is stored in the global location errno.

Errors

The named file is removed unless:

[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.

[EBUSY]

The directory to be removed is the mount point for a mounted file system.

[EFAULT]

Path points outside the process's allocated address space.

[EIO]

An I/O error occurs while deleting the directory entry or deallocating the inode.

[ELOOP]

Too many symbolic links are encountered in translating the pathname. This is taken to be indicative of a looping symbolic link.

[ENAMETOOLONG]

A component of a pathname (possibly expanded by a symbolic link) exceeds {NAME_MAX} characters, or an entire path name exceeded {PATH_MAX} characters.

[ENOENT]

The named directory does not exist.

[ENOTDIR]

A component of the path is not a directory.

[ENOTEMPTY]

The named directory contains files other than ‘.’ and ‘..’ in it.

[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.

[EROFS]

The directory entry to be removed resides on a read-only file system.

Releases

155 releases since Mac OS X 10.0; the text changed 3 times.

  1. 10.0–10.4.11
  2. 10.5–10.11.6
  3. 10.12–13.5
  4. 14.0–26.5

History

The rmdir() function call appeared in 4.2BSD.

From xnu 12377.121.6 in macOS 26.5. Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.