Rmdir

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The correct title of this article is rmdir. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

rmdir is a command which will remove an empty directory on a Unix or DOS-system. In Unix, it cannot be capitalized, whereas this doesn't apply for DOS. 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

To do this in DOS you should use deltree instead, or rd /s directory_name in Windows.

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