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| NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | STANDARDS | HISTORY | NOTES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON | |
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chdir(2) System Calls Manual chdir(2) chdir, fchdir - change working directory
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
#include <unistd.h> int chdir(const char *path); int fchdir(int fd); Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)): fchdir(): _XOPEN_SOURCE >= 500 || /* Since glibc 2.12: */ _POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200809L || /* glibc up to and including 2.19: */ _BSD_SOURCE
chdir() changes the current working directory of the calling process to the directory specified in path. fchdir() is identical to chdir(); the only difference is that the directory is given as an open file descriptor.
On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set to indicate the error.
Depending on the filesystem, other errors can be returned. The more general errors for chdir() are listed below: EACCES Search permission is denied for one of the components of path. (See also path_resolution(7).) EFAULT path points outside your accessible address space. EIO An I/O error occurred. ELOOP Too many symbolic links were encountered in resolving path. ENAMETOOLONG path is too long. ENOENT The directory specified in path does not exist. ENOMEM Insufficient kernel memory was available. ENOTDIR A component of path is not a directory. The general errors for fchdir() are listed below: EACCES Search permission was denied on the directory open on fd. EBADF fd is not a valid file descriptor. ENOTDIR fd does not refer to a directory.
POSIX.1-2008.
POSIX.1-2001, SVr4, 4.4BSD.
The current working directory is the starting point for interpreting relative pathnames (those not starting with '/'). A child process created via fork(2) inherits its parent's current working directory. The current working directory is left unchanged by execve(2).
chroot(2), getcwd(3), path_resolution(7)
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 chdir(2) Pages that refer to this page: chroot(2), clone(2), open(2), pivot_root(2), rmdir(2), syscalls(2), unshare(2), dirfd(3), fts(3), ftw(3), getcwd(3), cpuset(7), landlock(7), path_resolution(7), pthreads(7), signal-safety(7)
| 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. | |