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 non-empty.

‘-p’ ¶

‘--parents’

Remove directory, then try to remove each component of directory. 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 cause rmdir to exit unsuccessfully.

‘-v’ ¶

‘--verbose’

Give a diagnostic for each successful removal. directory is removed.

See rm: Remove files or directories, 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.