.\" Hey Emacs! This file is -*- nroff -*- source. .\" .\" This manpage is Copyright (C) 1992 Drew Eckhardt; .\" 1993 Michael Haardt; .\" 1993,1995 Ian Jackson. .\" .\" Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this .\" manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are .\" preserved on all copies. .\" .\" Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this .\" manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the .\" entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a .\" permission notice identical to this one .\" .\" Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this .\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date. The author(s) assume no .\" responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from .\" the use of the information contained herein. The author(s) may not .\" have taken the same level of care in the production of this manual, .\" which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working .\" professionally. .\" .\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by .\" the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work. .\" .\" Modified Sat Jul 24 00:35:52 1993 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) .\" .TH RENAME 2 "24 July 1993" "Linux 0.99.7" "Linux Programmer's Manual" .SH NAME rename \- change the name or location of a file .SH SYNOPSIS .B #include .sp .BI "int rename(const char *" oldpath ", const char *" newpath ); .SH DESCRIPTION .B rename renames a file, moving it between directories if required. Any other hard links to the file (as created using .BR link ) are unaffected. If .I newpath already exists it will be atomically overwritten (subject to a few conditions - see ERRORS below), so that there is no point at which another process attempting to access .I newpath will find it missing. If .I newpath exists but the operation fails for some reason or the system crashes .B rename guarantees to leave an instance of .I newpath in place. However, when overwriting there will probably be a window in which both .I oldpath and .I newpath refer to the file being renamed. If .I oldpath refers to a symbolic link the link is renamed; if .I newpath refers to a symbolic link the link will be overwritten. .SH "RETURN VALUE" On success, zero is returned. On error, \-1 is returned, and .I errno is set appropriately. .SH ERRORS .TP 0.8i .B EISDIR .I newpath is an existing directory, but .I oldpath is not a directory. .TP .B EXDEV .IR oldpath " and " newpath are not on the same filesystem. .TP .B ENOTEMPTY .IR newpath is a non-empty directory. .TP .B EBUSY .I newpath exists and is the current working directory or root directory of some process. .TP .B EINVAL An attempt was made to make a directory a subdirectory of itself. .TP .B EMLINK .I oldpath already has the maximum number of links to it, or it was a directory and the directory containing .I newpath has the maximum number of links. .TP .B ENOTDIR A component used as a directory in .IR oldpath " or " newpath is not, in fact, a directory. .TP .B EFAULT .IR oldpath " or " newpath " points outside your accessible address space." .TP .B EACCES Write access to the directory containing .IR oldpath " or " newpath is not allowed for the process's effective uid, or one of the directories in .IR oldpath " or " newpath did not allow search (execute) permission, or .I oldpath was a directory and did not allow write permission (needed to update the .B .. entry). .TP .B EPERM The directory containing .I oldpath has the sticky bit set and the process's effective uid is neither the uid of the file to be deleted nor that of the directory containing it, or the filesystem containing .IR pathname does not support renaming of the type requested. .TP .B ENAMETOOLONG .IR oldpath " or " newpath " was too long." .TP .B ENOENT A directory component in .I oldpath " or " newpath does not exist or is a dangling symbolic link. .TP .B ENOMEM Insufficient kernel memory was available. .TP .B EROFS The file is on a read-only filesystem. .TP .B ELOOP .IR oldpath " or " newpath contains a reference to a circular symbolic link, ie a symbolic link whose expansion contains a reference to itself. .TP .B ENOSPC The device containing the file has no room for the new directory entry. .SH "CONFORMING TO" POSIX, BSD 4.3, ANSI C .SH BUGS Currently (Linux 0.99pl7) most of the filesystems except Minix will not allow any overwriting .BR rename s involving directories. You get .BR EEXIST if you try. On NFS filesystems, you can not assume that only because 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 .IR link (2) for a similar problem. .SH "SEE ALSO" .BR link "(2), " unlink "(2), " symlink "(2), " mv "(1), " link (8).