path: root/man2/rename.2

.\" This manpage is Copyright (C) 1992 Drew Eckhardt;
.\"                               1993 Michael Haardt;
.\"                          1993,1995 Ian Jackson.
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.\" Modified Sat Jul 24 00:35:52 1993 by Rik Faith <faith@cs.unc.edu>
.\" Modified Thu Jun  4 12:21:13 1998 by Andries Brouwer <aeb@cwi.nl>
.\" Modified Thu Mar  3 09:49:35 2005 by Michael Haardt <michael@moria.de>
.\" 2007-03-25, mtk, added various text to DESCRIPTION.
.\"
.TH RENAME 2 2013-01-27 "Linux" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
.SH NAME
rename \- change the name or location of a file
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B #include <stdio.h>
.sp
.BI "int rename(const char *" oldpath ", const char *" newpath );
.SH DESCRIPTION
.BR rename ()
renames a file, moving it between directories if required.
Any other hard links to the file (as created using
.BR link (2))
are unaffected.
Open file descriptors for
.I oldpath
are also unaffected.

If
.I 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
.I newpath
will find it missing.

If
.I oldpath
and
.I newpath
are existing hard links referring to the same file, then
.BR rename ()
does nothing, and returns a success status.

If
.I newpath
exists but the operation fails for some reason
.BR rename ()
guarantees to leave an instance of
.I newpath
in place.

.I oldpath
can specify a directory.
In this case,
.I newpath
must either not exist, or it must specify an empty directory.

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
.B EACCES
Write permission is denied for the directory containing
.I oldpath
or
.IR newpath ,
or, search permission is denied for one of the directories
in the path prefix of
.I oldpath
or
.IR newpath ,
or
.I oldpath
is a directory and does not allow write permission (needed to update
the
.I ..
entry).
(See also
.BR path_resolution (7).)
.TP
.B EBUSY
The rename fails because
.IR 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
.B EBUSY
in such
cases\(emthere is nothing wrong with doing the rename anyway\(embut
it is allowed to return
.B EBUSY
if the system cannot otherwise
handle such situations.)
.TP
.B EDQUOT
The user's quota of disk blocks on the file system has been exhausted.
.TP
.B EFAULT
.IR oldpath " or " newpath " points outside your accessible address space."
.TP
.B 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.
.TP
.B EISDIR
.I newpath
is an existing directory, but
.I oldpath
is not a directory.
.TP
.B ELOOP
Too many symbolic links were encountered in resolving
.IR oldpath " or " newpath .
.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 ENAMETOOLONG
.IR oldpath " or " newpath " was too long."
.TP
.B ENOENT
The link named by
.I oldpath
does not exist;
or, a directory component in
.I newpath
does not exist;
or,
.I oldpath
or
.I newpath
is an empty string.
.TP
.B ENOMEM
Insufficient kernel memory was available.
.TP
.B ENOSPC
The device containing the file has no room for the new directory
entry.
.TP
.B ENOTDIR
A component used as a directory in
.IR oldpath " or " newpath
is not, in fact, a directory.
Or,
.I oldpath
is a directory, and
.I newpath
exists but is not a directory.
.TP
.BR ENOTEMPTY " or " EEXIST
.I newpath
is a nonempty directory, that is, contains entries other than "." and "..".
.TP
.BR EPERM " or " EACCES
The directory containing
.I oldpath
has the sticky bit
.RB ( 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
.B CAP_FOWNER
capability);
or
.I 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
.B CAP_FOWNER
capability);
or the file system containing
.I pathname
does not support renaming of the type requested.
.TP
.B EROFS
The file is on a read-only file system.
.TP
.B EXDEV
.IR oldpath " and " newpath
are not on the same mounted file system.
(Linux permits a file system to be mounted at multiple points, but
.BR rename ()
does not work across different mount points,
even if the same file system is mounted on both.)
.SH CONFORMING TO
4.3BSD, C89, C99, POSIX.1-2001.
.SH 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
.BR link (2)
for a similar problem.
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR mv (1),
.BR chmod (2),
.BR link (2),
.BR renameat (2),
.BR symlink (2),
.BR unlink (2),
.BR path_resolution (7),
.BR symlink (7)