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Manual Reference Pages  - RMDIR (1)

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rmdir - remove empty directories

CONTENTS

Synopsis
Description
Environment
Notes

rmdir [options] directory...

POSIX options: [-p] [--]

GNU options (shortest form): [-p] [--ignore-fail-on-non-empty] [--help] [--version] [--]

rmdir removes empty directories.

If any directory argument does not refer to an existing empty directory, it is an error.

-p	If directory includes more than one pathname component, remove it, then strip the last component and remove the resulting directory, etc., until all components have been removed. Thus, ‘rmdir -p a/b/c’ is equivalent to ‘rmdir a/b/c; rmdir a/b; rmdir a’.
--	Terminate option list.

--ignore-fail-on-non-empty
	Normally rmdir will refuse to remove a directory that is not empty. This option causes rmdir to ignore the failure to remove a directory, if that failure is due to the directory being non-empty. (New in file utils-4.0.)
-p, --parents
	As above.

--help	Print a usage message on standard output and exit successfully.
--version
	Print version information on standard output, then exit successfully.
--	Terminate option list.

The variables LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LC_MESSAGES have the usual meaning.

POSIX.2

The command ‘rmdir foo’ will remove the directory foo if it is empty. To remove a nonempty directory, together with everything below, use ‘rm -r foo’.

This page describes rmdir as found in the fileutils-4.0 package; other versions may differ slightly.