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RMDIR(2) System Calls Manual RMDIR(2)

rmdir — remove a directory file

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

#include <unistd.h>

int
rmdir(const char *path);

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

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:

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A component of the path is not a directory.
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A component of a pathname exceeded 255 characters, or an entire path name exceeded 1023 characters.
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The named directory does not exist.
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Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the pathname.
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The named directory contains files other than ‘.’ and ‘..’ in it.
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Search permission is denied for a component of the path prefix.
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Write permission is denied on the directory containing the link to be removed.
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The directory to be removed has its immutable, undeletable or append-only flag set, see the chflags(2) manual page for more information.
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The parent directory of the directory to be removed has its immutable or append-only flag set.
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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.
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The last component of the path is ‘.’ or ‘..’.
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The directory to be removed is the mount point for a mounted file system.
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An I/O error occurred while deleting the directory entry or deallocating the inode.
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The directory entry to be removed resides on a read-only file system.
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The path argument points outside the process's allocated address space.

mkdir(2), unlink(2)

The rmdir() system call appeared in 4.2BSD.

December 9, 2006 Debian