RM(1) | General Commands Manual | RM(1) |
rm
, unlink
— remove directory entries
rm |
[-f | -i ]
[-dIRrvWx ] file ... |
unlink |
[-- ] file |
The rm
utility attempts to remove the
non-directory type files specified on the command line. If the permissions
of the file do not permit writing, and the standard input device is a
terminal, the user is prompted (on the standard error output) for
confirmation.
The options are as follows:
-d
-f
-f
option overrides any previous
-i
options.-i
-i
option overrides any previous
-f
options.-I
-i
yet provides almost the same level
of protection against mistakes.-P
-R
-R
option
implies the -d
option. If the
-i
option is specified, the user is prompted for
confirmation before each directory's contents are processed (as well as
before the attempt is made to remove the directory). If the user does not
respond affirmatively, the file hierarchy rooted in that directory is
skipped.-r
-R
.-v
-W
-x
The rm
utility removes symbolic links, not
the files referenced by the links.
It is an error to attempt to remove the files /, . or ...
When the utility is called as unlink
, only
one argument, which must not be a directory, may be supplied. No options may
be supplied in this simple mode of operation, which performs an
unlink(2) operation on the passed
argument. However, the usual option-end delimiter,
--
, may optionally precede the argument.
The rm
utility exits 0 if all of the named
files or file hierarchies were removed, or if the -f
option was specified and all of the existing files or file hierarchies were
removed. If an error occurs, rm
exits with a value
>0.
The rm
command uses
getopt(3) to parse its arguments, which
allows it to accept the ‘--
’ option
which will cause it to stop processing flag options at that point. This will
allow the removal of file names that begin with a dash (‘-’).
For example:
rm -- -filename
The same behavior can be obtained by using an absolute or relative path reference. For example:
rm /home/user/-filename
rm ./-filename
Recursively remove all files contained within the foobar directory hierarchy:
$ rm -rf foobar
Any of these commands will remove the file -f:
$ rm -- -f $ rm ./-f $ unlink -f
The rm
utility differs from historical
implementations in that the -f
option only masks
attempts to remove non-existent files instead of masking a large variety of
errors. The -v
option is non-standard and its use in
scripts is not recommended.
Also, historical BSD implementations prompted on the standard output, not the standard error output.
The -P
option does not have any effect as
of FreeBSD 13 and may be removed in the future.
chflags(1), rmdir(1), undelete(2), unlink(2), fts(3), getopt(3), symlink(7)
The rm
command conforms to.
The simplified unlink
command conforms to
Version 2 of the Single UNIX Specification
(“SUSv2”).
A rm
command appeared in
Version 1 AT&T UNIX.
The -P
option assumes that the underlying
file system is a fixed-block file system. In addition, only regular files
are overwritten, other types of files are not.
November 10, 2018 | macOS 14.6 |