rmdir invocation (GNU Coreutils 9.0)
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12.7 rmdir: Remove empty directories
rmdir
removes empty directories. Synopsis:
rmdir [option]… directory…
If any directory
argument does not refer to an existing empty directory, it is an error.
The program accepts the following options. Also see Common options.
- ‘
--ignore-fail-on-non-empty
’ Ignore each failure to remove a directory that is solely because the directory is non-empty.
- ‘
-p
’
‘--parents
’ Remove
directory
, then try to remove each component ofdirectory
. So, for example, ‘rmdir -p a/b/c
’ is similar to ‘rmdir a/b/c a/b a
’. As such, it fails if any of those directories turns out not to be empty. Use the--ignore-fail-on-non-empty
option to make it so such a failure does not evoke a diagnostic and does not causermdir
to exit unsuccessfully.- ‘
-v
’
‘--verbose
’ Give a diagnostic for each successful removal.
directory
is removed.
See rm invocation, for how to remove non-empty directories recursively.
To remove all empty directories under dirname
, including directories that become empty because other directories are removed, you can use either of the following commands:
# This uses GNU extensions. find dirname -type d -empty -delete # This runs on any POSIX platform. find dirname -depth -type d -exec rmdir {} +
An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value indicates failure.