ADC Home > Reference Library > Reference > Mac OS X > Mac OS X Man Pages

 

This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

This manual page is associated with the Mac OS X developer tools. The software or headers described may not be present on your Mac OS X installation until you install the developer tools package. This package is available on your Mac OS X installation DVD, and the latest versions can be downloaded from developer.apple.com.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).



RMDIR(2)                    BSD System Calls Manual                   RMDIR(2)

NAME
     rmdir -- remove a directory file

SYNOPSIS
     #include <unistd.h>

     int
     rmdir(const char *path);

DESCRIPTION
     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.

SEE ALSO
     mkdir(2), unlink(2)

HISTORY
     The rmdir() function call appeared in 4.2BSD.

4.2 Berkeley Distribution        June 4, 1993        4.2 Berkeley Distribution

Did this document help you?
Yes: Tell us what works for you.
It’s good, but: Report typos, inaccuracies, and so forth.
It wasn’t helpful: Tell us what would have helped.