Hello. I am trying to programmatically remove a folder (the program is in c/c++). I saw rmdir doesn't work for non-empty directories. Is deleting it's contents first the only solution? Thank you.

Use "rm -rf <directory>" instead

-r = recursive
-f = force (you won't be asked to delete files)

Hope it helps

Yes, you are right. But I was hoping not to be forced to resort to external commands.. Thank you.

rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty <directory>

will delete a folder even if it is full

) I really think you did not fully understand. I said I wanted to do it programmatically (from c), eg by calling a function. Not by using a command. And since I will have to use external programs, I will use rm..

I don't think most of us understands what you are trying to do. First time I read, you thought that the "rm" command would not work with empty directories. It does. When I read the second time, it looked like you are trying to create a c program that deletes directories. Re-reading everything, makes me think that you want to run a system command from a c program, but you couldn't because you believed that rm could not delete non-empty directories.

So what are you trying to do? If you want to call rm from a C program, something like this should help:

I can't compile this now, but I think it should work.

To clear things up. Yes, at first i was looking for some way of deleting the folder, without resorting to external commands (rm, rmdir). When I said I should have liked to use rmdir, I was talking about the function. ( )
So, if possible, I wouldn't have used system, popen or such to call the external program, be it rm or rmdir.

And yes, I know that rm can delete empty directories, where did I state it can't?

Long time since I did some C programming, but if you can't delete a non-empty directory, write a function that goes into the directory, deleting all files in it, and then delete the actual dir.

Should take to many lines to program.

Make it recursive, so dirs inside dirs are also emptied and deleted..

Yes BlackRabbit, I will try to write it in the future, although the performance could be an issue.. That folder could contain many many folders which in their turn.. You get what I mean. Thank you for your help.

Yes, if you want to code "rm -r" yourself in C, you really need to dive into the directory-tree, and delete all files at the bottom, then crawl up and remove the just-emptied directories.

For a code example to do this recursively see this forum thread

Or have a look at the srouces of "rm" of course.

P.S. IMHO the question was crystal clear from the first post.

Yup Hko, your code in the other thread looks pretty good . Guess I should have searched in the forum before asking the question
Thank you.

Performance shouldn't be an issue really.

The problem with using this sort of thing:

is the huge possibility of an injection exploit. What if someone tries to delete a folder (in the local directory) called "" ? You could change it to system("rm -rf ./<directory>/"); to prevent it from deleting the main directory, but it's still pretty easy to exploit (suppose <directory> is set to ' `rm -rf /` ' ). Just a thought.

I knew there was something fundamentally wrong with using external commands. Reading from other posts, I have always learned to prefer a "c" way instead of an external program.

Now I know what to say when people advise me to use external commands (it so happens that in my program the string with the directory to delete comes from a client through the network, so the possibility of an exploit would be even greater).