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RENAME(2) Linux Programmer's Manual RENAME(2)
rename - change the name or location of a file
#include <stdio.h>
int rename(const char *oldpath, const char *newpath);
rename() renames a file, moving it between directories if required. Any other
hard links to the file (as created using link(2)) are unaffected. Open file
descriptors for oldpath are also unaffected.
If newpath already exists it will be atomically replaced (subject to a few
conditions; see ERRORS below), so that there is no point at which another
process attempting to access newpath will find it missing.
If oldpath and newpath are existing hard links referring to the same file,
then rename() does nothing, and returns a success status.
If newpath exists but the operation fails for some reason rename() guarantees
to leave an instance of newpath in place.
oldpath can specify a directory. In this case, newpath must either not exist,
or it must specify an empty directory.
However, when overwriting there will probably be a window in which both
oldpath and newpath refer to the file being renamed.
If oldpath refers to a symbolic link the link is renamed; if newpath refers to
a symbolic link the link will be overwritten.
On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set
appropriately.
EACCES Write permission is denied for the directory containing oldpath or
newpath, or, search permission is denied for one of the directories in
the path prefix of oldpath or newpath, or oldpath is a directory and
does not allow write permission (needed to update the .. entry). (See
also path_resolution(7).)
EBUSY The rename fails because oldpath or newpath is a directory that is in
use by some process (perhaps as current working directory, or as root
directory, or because it was open for reading) or is in use by the
system (for example as mount point), while the system considers this an
error. (Note that there is no requirement to return EBUSY in such
cases -- there is nothing wrong with doing the rename anyway -- but it
is allowed to return EBUSY if the system cannot otherwise handle such
situations.)
EFAULT oldpath or newpath points outside your accessible address space.
EINVAL The new pathname contained a path prefix of the old, or, more
generally, an attempt was made to make a directory a subdirectory of
itself.
EISDIR newpath is an existing directory, but oldpath is not a directory.
ELOOP Too many symbolic links were encountered in resolving oldpath or
newpath.
EMLINK oldpath already has the maximum number of links to it, or it was a
directory and the directory containing newpath has the maximum number
of links.
ENAMETOOLONG
oldpath or newpath was too long.
ENOENT The link named by oldpath does not exist; or, a directory component in
newpath does not exist; or, oldpath or newpath is an empty string.
ENOMEM Insufficient kernel memory was available.
ENOSPC The device containing the file has no room for the new directory entry.
ENOTDIR
A component used as a directory in oldpath or newpath is not, in fact,
a directory. Or, oldpath is a directory, and newpath exists but is not
a directory.
ENOTEMPTY or EEXIST
newpath is a nonempty directory, that is, contains entries other than
"." and "..".
EPERM or EACCES
The directory containing oldpath has the sticky bit (S_ISVTX) set and
the process's effective user ID is neither the user ID of the file to
be deleted nor that of the directory containing it, and the process is
not privileged (Linux: does not have the CAP_FOWNER capability); or
newpath is an existing file and the directory containing it has the
sticky bit set and the process's effective user ID is neither the user
ID of the file to be replaced nor that of the directory containing it,
and the process is not privileged (Linux: does not have the CAP_FOWNER
capability); or the file system containing pathname does not support
renaming of the type requested.
EROFS The file is on a read-only file system.
EXDEV oldpath and newpath are not on the same mounted file system. (Linux
permits a file system to be mounted at multiple points, but rename()
does not work across different mount points, even if the same file
system is mounted on both.)
4.3BSD, C89, C99, POSIX.1-2001.
On NFS file systems, you can not assume that if the operation failed the file
was not renamed. If the server does the rename operation and then crashes,
the retransmitted RPC which will be processed when the server is up again
causes a failure. The application is expected to deal with this. See link(2)
for a similar problem.
mv(1), chmod(2), link(2), renameat(2), symlink(2), unlink(2),
path_resolution(7), symlink(7)
This page is part of release 3.32 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found
at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Linux 2009-03-30 RENAME(2)
HTML rendering created 2010-12-03 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface