int rename(const char *oldpath, const char *newpath);
DESCRIPTION
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.
RETURN VALUE
On success, zero is returned.
On error, -1 is returned, and
errno
is set appropriately.
ERRORS
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
A directory component in
oldpath or newpath
does not exist or is a dangling symbolic link.
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 non-empty 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.)
CONFORMING TO
4.3BSD, C89, C99, POSIX.1-2001.
BUGS
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.
This page is part of release 3.14 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/.