Thanks Pádraig Brady for your reply. You mentioned the manual page for rmdir(2) and the POSIX spec. But isn't that POSIX spec talking about the rmdir(2) system call - not the rmdir(1) executable?
As far as I know there is no requirement that rmdir(1) be an exact wrapper for rmdir(2); rather its purpose as stated in the the documentation is to remove empty directories. If it can do that job better by handling foo/. rather than giving an Invalid argument error, surely that's an improvement? "The meaning of deleting pathname/. is unclear, because the name of the file (directory) in the parent directory to be removed is not clear, particularly in the presence of multiple links to a directory." In theory that is true but don't all modern Unix systems disallow creating hard links to a directory? So in practice 'foo/.' is pretty unambiguous. But out of interest, "If the path argument refers to a path whose final component is either dot or dot-dot, rmdir() shall fail." Does POSIX document the error status that should be returned in these cases? -- Ed Avis <e...@waniasset.com>
