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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)
| 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. | |