On success, zero is returned.
On error, -1 is returned, and
errno
is set appropriately.
ERRORS
EACCES
Write access to the directory containing
pathname
was not allowed, or one of the directories in the path prefix of
pathname
did not allow search permission.
(See also
path_resolution(7).
EBUSY
pathname
is currently in use by the system or some process that prevents its
removal.
On Linux this means
pathname
is currently used as a mount point
or is the root directory of the calling process.
EFAULT
pathname points outside your accessible address space.
EINVAL
pathname
has
.
as last component.
ELOOP
Too many symbolic links were encountered in resolving
pathname.
ENAMETOOLONG
pathname was too long.
ENOENT
A directory component in
pathname
does not exist or is a dangling symbolic link.
ENOMEM
Insufficient kernel memory was available.
ENOTDIR
pathname,
or a component used as a directory in
pathname,
is not, in fact, a directory.
ENOTEMPTY
pathname
contains entries other than
. and .. ;
or,
pathname
has
..
as its final component.
POSIX.1-2001 also allows
EEXIST
for this condition.
EPERM
The directory containing
pathname
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 file system containing
pathname
does not support the removal of directories.
EROFS
pathname
refers to a directory on a read-only file system.
CONFORMING TO
SVr4, 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001.
BUGS
Infelicities in the protocol underlying NFS can cause the unexpected
disappearance of directories which are still being used.
This page is part of release 3.14 of the Linux
man-pages
project.
A description of the project,
and information about reporting bugs,
can be found at
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.