Say you want to find out all directories named ‘session’ and delete them in the current directory, run: Use find command to delete unwanted directories When prompted, you need to provide root user or sudo user password. However, a sysadmin can delete any directories created by anyone on the system. Only owners can delete their directories. -f : Attempt to remove the files without prompting for confirmation, regardless of the file’s permissionsĪre you getting permission denied error message while removing directories?.recursively remove subdirectories and files from the specified directory. -r : Attempt to remove the file hierarchy rooted in each file argument i.e.

Warning: All files including subdirectories will be deleted permanently when executed the following commands. For example, remove *.doc files and all sub-directories and files inside letters directory, type the following command: To remove all directories and subdirectories use the rm command. Linux remove entire directory including all files and sub-directories command To delete all directories starting with ‘dir’ in the current, you would use the following command: We have three dirs named dir1, dir2, and dir3. We can use wildcards such as ‘*’ and ‘?’ to match and delete multiple directories. Sample outputs: rmdir: removing directory, 'dir1' Removing directories with rmdir and wildcards How to see a diagnostic message for every directory processed -p : Each directory argument is treated as a pathname of which all components will be removed, if they are empty, starting with the last most component.In this next example, remove data, foo and bar if bar were empty, foo only contained bar and data only contained foo directories: You can cd to the directory to find out and list all files:ĭelete those files or directories.

Sample outputs: rmdir: letters: Directory not empty

If a directory is not empty you will get an error message that read as follows: Open a command line terminal (select Applications > Accessories > Terminal), and then type the following command to remove a directory called /tmp/docs: $ rmdir dir1 Delete directory Linux Command Open the terminal application and run command to delete given directory. The rmdir command remove the DIRECTORY(ies), if they are empty. rmdir command syntax to delete directory in Linux Let us see some examples and usage in details to delete the directories or folders under Linux operating system using the CLI. You can delete non-empty directories with rm command in Linux.

rm command – Remove the file including sub-directories.

rmdir command – Deletes the specified empty directories and folders in Linux.

There are two command to delete a folder in Linux:

Linux remove directory