RMDIR(1) General Commands Manual RMDIR(1)

rmdir — remove directories

rmdir [-p] dir...

The rmdir utility shall remove the directory entry specified by each dir operand.

For each dir operand, the rmdir utility shall perform actions equivalent to the rmdir(3) function called with the dir operand as its only argument.

Directories shall be processed in the order specified. If a directory and a subdirectory of that directory are specified in a single invocation of the rmdir utility, the application shall specify the subdirectory before the parent directory so that the parent directory will be empty when the rmdir utility tries to remove it.

The rmdir utility shall conform to XBD V1_chap12(7).

The following option shall be supported:

Remove all directories in a pathname. For each dir operand:
  1. The directory entry it names shall be removed.
  2. If the dir operand includes more than one pathname component, effects equivalent to the following command shall occur: 
    rmdir -p $(dirname dir)

The following operand shall be supported:

dir
A pathname of an empty directory to be removed.

Not used.

None.

The following environment variables shall affect the execution of rmdir:

Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (See XBD for the precedence of internationalization variables used to determine the values of locale categories.)
If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables.
Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments).
Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error.
[ XSI] Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES.

Default.

Not used.

The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.

None.

None.

The following exit values shall be returned:

Each directory entry specified by a dir operand was removed successfully.
An error occurred.

Default.

The definition of an empty directory is one that contains, at most, directory entries for dot and dot-dot.

If a directory in the current directory is empty except it contains a directory and is empty except it contains a directory :

rmdir -p a/b/c

removes all three directories.

On historical System V systems, the -p option also caused a message to be written to the standard output. The message indicated whether the whole path was removed or whether part of the path remained for some reason. The STDERR section requires this diagnostic when the entire path specified by a dir operand is not removed, but does not allow the status message reporting success to be written as a diagnostic.

The rmdir utility on System V also included a -s option that suppressed the informational message output by the -p option. This option has been omitted because the informational message is not specified by this volume of POSIX.1-2008.

None.

rm(1)

XBD V1_chap08(7), V1_chap12(7)

XSH remove(3), rmdir(3), unlink(3)

First released in Issue 2.

The normative text is reworded to avoid use of the term "must" for application requirements.

January 1, 2016 posix.fail