You can delete a file with unlink
or remove
.
Deletion actually deletes a file name. If this is the file's only name, then the file is deleted as well. If the file has other remaining names (see section Hard Links), it remains accessible under those names.
unlink
function deletes the file name filename. If
this is a file's sole name, the file itself is also deleted. (Actually,
if any process has the file open when this happens, deletion is
postponed until all processes have closed the file.)
The function unlink
is declared in the header file `unistd.h'.
This function returns 0
on successful completion, and -1
on error. In addition to the usual file name errors
(see section File Name Errors), the following errno
error conditions are
defined for this function:
EACCES
EBUSY
ENOENT
EPERM
unlink
cannot be used to delete the name of a
directory, or at least can only be used this way by a privileged user.
To avoid such problems, use rmdir
to delete directories. (In the
GNU system unlink
can never delete the name of a directory.)
EROFS
rmdir
function deletes a directory. The directory must be
empty before it can be removed; in other words, it can only contain
entries for `.' and `..'.
In most other respects, rmdir
behaves like unlink
. There
are two additional errno
error conditions defined for
rmdir
:
ENOTEMPTY
EEXIST
These two error codes are synonymous; some systems use one, and some use
the other. The GNU system always uses ENOTEMPTY
.
The prototype for this function is declared in the header file `unistd.h'.
unlink
for files and like rmdir
for directories.
remove
is declared in `stdio.h'.
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