As a Linux user, you need to delete or remove unwanted directories in your system to make it clean and tidy. This tutorial will guide a new Linux user to delete directory in Linux using rmdir command.

Linux rmdir command

When there is tool to create something, there must be tool to remove it. The Linux rmdir command is the opposite tool of mkdir command. If mkdir command creates directory then the rmdir command removes directory, but only empty directory. Let's see what is written in rmdir manual page:

NAME
       rmdir - remove empty directories

SYNOPSIS
       rmdir [OPTION]... DIRECTORY...

DESCRIPTION
       Remove the DIRECTORY(ies), if they are empty.

       --ignore-fail-on-non-empty

              ignore each failure that is solely because a directory is non-empty

       -p, --parents
              Remove DIRECTORY and its ancestors.  E.g., `rmdir -p a/b/c' is similar
              to `rmdir a/b/c a/b a'.

       -v, --verbose
              output a diagnostic for every directory processed

       --help display this help and exit

       --version
              output version information and exit

As you can see, there is also not many options available with rmdir. The syntax is similar to the mkdir, just replace it with rmdir, rmdir <new directory>. Despite of the similarity, rmdir is not that popular because it can only delete an empty directory. That means, if a directory contains file or child directory, then rmdir is useless. You can't delete a directory without delete its content first.

Try this example:

luzar@slackware:~$ mkdir parent
luzar@slackware:~$ mkdir parent/child
luzar@slackware:~$ touch parent/file.txt
luzar@slackware:~$ ls parent/
child/  file.txt
luzar@slackware:~$

We created a directory with a child and a file in it. Now let us try to delete the parent directory:

luzar@slackware:~$ rmdir parent/
rmdir: parent/: Directory not empty
luzar@slackware:~$

We can't delete the parent directory because it's not empty. Is that bad? No it's not. The rmdir reminds us that the directory is not empty. There maybe contains useful data. So, check that first, and if it's rubbish, then delete all the data and after that you can delete the directory itself.

Here is another good thing about Linux rmdir command:

luzar@slackware:~$ ls -l parent/
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 2 luzar users 4096 2008-12-18 03:15 child/
-rw-r--r-- 1 luzar users    0 2008-12-18 03:16 file.txt
luzar@slackware:~$ rm parent/file.txt
luzar@slackware:~$ rmdir -p parent/child/
luzar@slackware:~$ ls
Desktop/  testsamba/
luzar@slackware:~$

When using rmdir with -p option, rmdir will remove the parent as well (of course in condition the parent and child contain no file). So that concludes the rmdir command tutorial. If you want to more information about deleting Linux directory, for example, how to delete or remove directory with sub-directory and files in it, take a look at Linux rm command - delete file and directory in Linux tutorial.

Back to Linux basic commands main page.