HP-UX Reference (11i v1 00/12) - 1 User Commands N-Z (vol 2)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
STANDARD Printed by: Nora Chuang [nchuang] STANDARD
/build/1111/BRICK/man1/neqn.1
________________________________________________________________
___ ___
r
rm(1) rm(1)
NAME
rm - remove files or directories
SYNOPSIS
rm [-f-i][-Rr] file ...
DESCRIPTION
The rm command removes the entries for one or more files from a directory. If an entry was the last link
to the file, the file is destroyed. Removal of a file requires write and search (execute) permission in its
directory, but no permissions on the file itself. However, if the sticky bit is set on the directory containing
the file, only the owner of the file, the owner of the directory, or a user having appropriate privileges can
remove the file.
If a user does not have write permission for a file to be removed and standard input is a terminal, a prompt
containing the file name and its permissions is printed requesting that the removal of the file be confirmed
(see Access Control Lists below). A line is then read from standard input. If that line begins with y the file
is deleted; otherwise, the file remains. No questions are asked when the -f option is given or if standard
input is not a terminal.
If file is of type directory, and the
-f option is not specified, and either the permissions of file do not permit
writing and standard input is a terminal or the
-i option is specified, rm writes a prompt to standard error
and reads a line from standard input. If the response does not begin with
y, it does nothing more with the
current file and goes on to any remaining files.
If file is a symbolic link, then only the symbolic link is removed. The file or directory pointed to by the sym-
bolic link is not affected. If any of the intermediate path components of file happens to be a symbolic link,
then
rm follows the symbolic link and removes the file.
Options
rm recognizes the following options:
-f Force each file or directory to be removed without prompting for confirmation, regardless of the
permissions of the entry. This option also suppresses diagnostic messages regarding nonexistent
operands.
This option does not suppress any diagnostic messages other than those regarding nonexistent
operands. To suppress all error message and interactive prompts, the -f option should be used
while redirecting standard error output to /dev/null.
This option ignores any previous occurrence of the -i option.
-i Write a prompt to standard error requesting confirmation before removing each entry.
This option ignores any previous occurrence of the -f option.
-R For each argument that is a directory, this option causes rm to recursively delete the entire con-
tents of that directory before removing the directory itself. When used in conjunction with the
-i option, rm asks whether to examine each directory before interactively removing files in that
directory and again afterward to confirm removing the directory itself.
The -R option will descend to arbitrary depths in a file hierarchy and will not fail due to path
length limitations unless the length of file name, file specified by the user exceeds system limi-
tations.
-r Equivalent to -R.
Access Control Lists
If a file has optional ACL entries, rm displays a plus sign (+) after the file’s permissions. The permissions
shown summarize the file’s st_mode value returned by stat() (see stat(2)). See also acl(5).
EXTERNAL INFLUENCES
Environment Variables
LANG provides a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. If LANG
is
unset or null, the default value of "C" (see lang(5)) is used. If any of the internationalization variables con-
tains an invalid setting,
rm will behave as if all internationalization variables are set to "C". See
environ(5).
Section 1−−796 − 1 − HP-UX Release 11i: December 2000
___
___