man2/rename.2

   1 .\" Hey Emacs! This file is -*- nroff -*- source.
   2 .\"
   3 .\" This manpage is Copyright (C) 1992 Drew Eckhardt;
   4 .\"                               1993 Michael Haardt;
   5 .\"                          1993,1995 Ian Jackson.
   6 .\"
   7 .\" Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
   8 .\" manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are
   9 .\" preserved on all copies.
  10 .\"
  11 .\" Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
  12 .\" manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the
  13 .\" entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a
  14 .\" permission notice identical to this one.
  15 .\"
  16 .\" Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this
  17 .\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date.  The author(s) assume no
  18 .\" responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from
  19 .\" the use of the information contained herein.  The author(s) may not
  20 .\" have taken the same level of care in the production of this manual,
  21 .\" which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working
  22 .\" professionally.
  23 .\"
  24 .\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by
  25 .\" the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work.
  26 .\"
  27 .\" Modified Sat Jul 24 00:35:52 1993 by Rik Faith <faith@cs.unc.edu>
  28 .\" Modified Thu Jun  4 12:21:13 1998 by Andries Brouwer <aeb@cwi.nl>
  29 .\" Modified Thu Mar  3 09:49:35 2005 by Michael Haardt <michael@moria.de>
  30 .\" 2007-03-25, mtk, added various text to DESCRIPTION.
  31 .\"
  32 .TH RENAME 2 1998-06-04 "Linux" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
  33 .SH NAME
  34 rename \- change the name or location of a file
  35 .SH SYNOPSIS
  36 .B #include <stdio.h>
  37 .sp
  38 .BI "int rename(const char *" oldpath ", const char *" newpath );
  39 .SH DESCRIPTION
  40 .BR rename ()
  41 renames a file, moving it between directories if required.
  42 Any other hard links to the file (as created using
  43 .BR link (2))
  44 are unaffected.
  45 Open file descriptors for
  46 .I oldpath
  47 are also unaffected.
  48
  49 If
  50 .I newpath
  51 already exists it will be atomically replaced (subject to
  52 a few conditions; see ERRORS below), so that there is
  53 no point at which another process attempting to access
  54 .I newpath
  55 will find it missing.
  56
  57 If
  58 .I oldpath
  59 and
  60 .I newpath
  61 are existing hard links referring to the same file, then
  62 .BR rename ()
  63 does nothing, and returns a success status.
  64
  65 If
  66 .I newpath
  67 exists but the operation fails for some reason
  68 .BR rename ()
  69 guarantees to leave an instance of
  70 .I newpath
  71 in place.
  72
  73 .I oldpath
  74 can specify a directory.
  75 In this case,
  76 .I newpath
  77 must either not exist, or it must specify an empty directory.
  78
  79 However, when overwriting there will probably be a window in which
  80 both
  81 .I oldpath
  82 and
  83 .I newpath
  84 refer to the file being renamed.
  85
  86 If
  87 .I oldpath
  88 refers to a symbolic link the link is renamed; if
  89 .I newpath
  90 refers to a symbolic link the link will be overwritten.
  91 .SH "RETURN VALUE"
  92 On success, zero is returned.
  93 On error, \-1 is returned, and
  94 .I errno
  95 is set appropriately.
  96 .SH ERRORS
  97 .TP
  98 .B EACCES
  99 Write permission is denied for the directory containing
 100 .I oldpath
 101 or
 102 .IR newpath ,
 103 or, search permission is denied for one of the directories
 104 in the path prefix of
 105 .I oldpath
 106 or
 107 .IR newpath ,
 108 or
 109 .I oldpath
 110 is a directory and does not allow write permission (needed to update
 111 the
 112 .I ..
 113 entry).
 114 (See also
 115 .BR path_resolution (7).)
 116 .TP
 117 .B EBUSY
 118 The rename fails because
 119 .IR oldpath " or " newpath
 120 is a directory that is in use by some process (perhaps as
 121 current working directory, or as root directory, or because
 122 it was open for reading) or is in use by the system
 123 (for example as mount point), while the system considers
 124 this an error.
 125 (Note that there is no requirement to return EBUSY in such
 126 cases \(em there is nothing wrong with doing the rename anyway \(em
 127 but it is allowed to return EBUSY if the system cannot otherwise
 128 handle such situations.)
 129 .TP
 130 .B EFAULT
 131 .IR oldpath " or " newpath " points outside your accessible address space."
 132 .TP
 133 .B EINVAL
 134 The new pathname contained a path prefix of the old, or, more generally,
 135 an attempt was made to make a directory a subdirectory of itself.
 136 .TP
 137 .B EISDIR
 138 .I newpath
 139 is an existing directory, but
 140 .I oldpath
 141 is not a directory.
 142 .TP
 143 .B ELOOP
 144 Too many symbolic links were encountered in resolving
 145 .IR oldpath " or " newpath .
 146 .TP
 147 .B EMLINK
 148 .I oldpath
 149 already has the maximum number of links to it, or
 150 it was a directory and the directory containing
 151 .I newpath
 152 has the maximum number of links.
 153 .TP
 154 .B ENAMETOOLONG
 155 .IR oldpath " or " newpath " was too long."
 156 .TP
 157 .B ENOENT
 158 A directory component in
 159 .I oldpath " or " newpath
 160 does not exist or is a dangling symbolic link.
 161 .TP
 162 .B ENOMEM
 163 Insufficient kernel memory was available.
 164 .TP
 165 .B ENOSPC
 166 The device containing the file has no room for the new directory
 167 entry.
 168 .TP
 169 .B ENOTDIR
 170 A component used as a directory in
 171 .IR oldpath " or " newpath
 172 is not, in fact, a directory.
 173 Or,
 174 .I oldpath
 175 is a directory, and
 176 .I newpath
 177 exists but is not a directory.
 178 .TP
 179 .BR ENOTEMPTY " or " EEXIST
 180 .IR newpath
 181 is a non-empty directory, that is, contains entries other than "." and "..".
 182 .TP
 183 .BR EPERM " or " EACCES
 184 The directory containing
 185 .I oldpath
 186 has the sticky bit
 187 .RB ( S_ISVTX )
 188 set and the process's effective user ID is neither
 189 the user ID of the file to be deleted nor that of the directory
 190 containing it, and the process is not privileged
 191 (Linux: does not have the
 192 .B CAP_FOWNER
 193 capability);
 194 or
 195 .I newpath
 196 is an existing file and the directory containing it has the sticky bit set
 197 and the process's effective user ID is neither the user ID of the file
 198 to be replaced nor that of the directory containing it,
 199 and the process is not privileged
 200 (Linux: does not have the
 201 .B CAP_FOWNER
 202 capability);
 203 or the filesystem containing
 204 .IR pathname
 205 does not support renaming of the type requested.
 206 .TP
 207 .B EROFS
 208 The file is on a read-only filesystem.
 209 .TP
 210 .B EXDEV
 211 .IR oldpath " and " newpath
 212 are not on the same mounted filesystem.
 213 (Linux permits a filesystem to be mounted at multiple points, but
 214 .BR rename (2)
 215 does not work across different mount points,
 216 even if the same filesystem is mounted on both.)
 217 .SH "CONFORMING TO"
 218 4.3BSD, C89, C99, POSIX.1-2001.
 219 .SH BUGS
 220 On NFS filesystems, you can not assume that if the operation
 221 failed the file was not renamed.
 222 If the server does the rename operation
 223 and then crashes, the retransmitted RPC which will be processed when the
 224 server is up again causes a failure.
 225 The application is expected to
 226 deal with this.
 227 See
 228 .BR link (2)
 229 for a similar problem.
 230 .SH "SEE ALSO"
 231 .BR mv (1),
 232 .BR chmod (2),
 233 .BR link (2),
 234 .BR renameat (2),
 235 .BR symlink (2),
 236 .BR unlink (2),
 237 .BR path_resolution (7)