RENAME(2)                                           Linux Programmer's Manual                                          RENAME(2)



NAME
       rename - change the name or location of a file

SYNOPSIS
       #include <stdio.h>

       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 suc-
       cess 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 overwrit-
       ten.

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 exam-
              ple 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 new-
              path 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  capa-
              bility); 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 multi-
              ple 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.

SEE ALSO
       mv(1), chmod(2), link(2), renameat(2), symlink(2), unlink(2), path_resolution(7), symlink(7)

COLOPHON
       This  page  is  part of release 3.25 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)