Removing a file or directory

Note: When you remove a file or directory using Unix, it is permanently removed.
There is no way to recover it!

Removing a file

You can remove or erase a file using the rm (remove) command. After you enter the command the system will ask you if you're sure you want to erase the file. You can then type y if you still want to erase the file or n if you've changed your mind. It's always a good idea to doublecheck at this point to ensure that you are deleting the right file (that you didn't make a mistake when typing its name). Once you delete the file, it's gone for good. The DOS equivalent for this command is del or erase.

The process of removing a file looks like this:

unity% rm test.dat
rm: remove test.dat? y
unity%

After you press the Return key, your prompt appears again, and it seems like nothing has happened. However, as a general rule, if you don't get an error message, you can assume that the command worked. You could use the ls command to verify that the file was erased.

Be careful about using the rm command - you don't want to accidentally delete your math homework or term paper!

Removing a directory

You can remove a directory with the rmdir (remove directory) command. For example, to remove a directory named biology, you would enter the following command:

rmdir biology

However,if the biology directory contained any files you'd get the following message:

rmdir: biology: Directory not empty

As a safeguard, directories must be empty before they can be removed. Also, you cannot be inside the directory you are trying to remove.

To remove the biology directory, you would first remove all the files in it. Then you could remove the directory itself. To quickly remove all files in a directory, you could use the wildcard symbol, the asterisk (*). When you use this option, the system will prompt you for permission to delete a file before actually doing so. Answer "y" to delete the file or "n" to not delete.

In the above example, you would change to the "biology" directory and issue the rm command and then respond to the prompts as shown below:

unity% cd biology
unity% rm * 
rm bio_homework1? y 
rm bio_notes? y 
rm test3.txt? y
unity% cd ..
unity% rmdir biology

To remove a directory and all files and directories within it, you can use the -r option of rm to recursively delete the files in the directory, its subdirectories and, finally, the directory itself.

The DOS equivalent of the rmdir command is rd or rmdir.

Last modified July 20, 2004 by cawalker