Rmdir

rmdir (or rd) is a command which will remove an empty directory on a Unix, DOS, OS/2 or Microsoft Windows operating system. In Unix, it cannot be capitalized, whereas this doesn't apply for DOS, OS/2 and Windows. Normal usage is straightforward where one types:

rmdir name_of_directory

Where name_of_directory corresponds with the name of the directory one wishes to delete. There are options to this command such as -p in Unix which removes parent directories if they are also empty.

For example:

rmdir -p foo/bar/baz

Will first remove baz/, then bar/ and finally foo/ thus removing the entire directory tree specified in the command argument.

rmdir will not remove a directory if it is not empty in UNIX. The correct way to remove a directory and all its contents recursively is with the rm command. For example:

rm -r foo/bar/baz

The DOS equivalent of this command is deltree, or

rd /s directory_name

in Microsoft Windows.

See also

• List of Unix programs
• List of DOS commands

References

• [1] The program's manpage