willz99ta

Howdy,

I am looking for a command that would be able to delete a text file in a UNIX directory from a C application. Is there anyway to do this?

Thanks for your help,
Willz99ta

Ashcroft

'unlink' is what you want.

Note that this decrements the link count on a file, so if there are multiple hardlinks to that file for some reason this will not delete it. Also if a process has the file open when you unlink it the directory entry will be removed but the file itself will continue to exist while the process has it open.

willz99ta

So this would delete the physical file in a UXIX directory, like the remove command does in ANSI-C?

Thanks for your help,
Willz99ta

Ashcroft

Yeah 'unlink' is a unix syscall to remove files. 'remove' will do the exact same thing, it calls 'unlink' if the specified path is a file and 'rmdir' (another syscall) if the specified path is a directory.

kurifu

Type this on command line:

man 2 unlink

You will get all the details you need in using it.

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