RemoveDirectoryA function (fileapi.h)

Article
06/01/2023

Deletes an existing empty directory.

To perform this operation as a transacted operation, use the RemoveDirectoryTransacted function.

Syntax

BOOL RemoveDirectoryA(
  [in] LPCSTR lpPathName
);

Parameters

[in] lpPathName

The path of the directory to be removed. This path must specify an empty directory, and the calling process must have delete access to the directory.

By default, the name is limited to MAX_PATH characters. To extend this limit to 32,767 wide characters, prepend "\\?\" to the path. For more information, see Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces.

Tip

Starting with Windows 10, Version 1607, you can opt-in to remove the MAX_PATH limitation without prepending "\\?\". See the "Maximum Path Length Limitation" section of Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces for details.

Return value

If the function succeeds, the return value is nonzero.

If the function fails, the return value is zero. To get extended error information, call GetLastError.

Remarks

The RemoveDirectory function marks a directory for deletion on close. Therefore, the directory is not removed until the last handle to the directory is closed.

To recursively delete the files in a directory, use the SHFileOperation function.

RemoveDirectory removes a directory junction, even if the contents of the target are not empty; the function removes directory junctions regardless of the state of the target object. For more information on junctions, see Hard Links and Junctions.

In Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, this function is supported by the following technologies.

Technology	Supported
Server Message Block (SMB) 3.0 protocol	Yes
SMB 3.0 Transparent Failover (TFO)	Yes
SMB 3.0 with Scale-out File Shares (SO)	Yes
Cluster Shared Volume File System (CsvFS)	Yes
Resilient File System (ReFS)	Yes

Note

The fileapi.h header defines RemoveDirectory as an alias which automatically selects the ANSI or Unicode version of this function based on the definition of the UNICODE preprocessor constant. Mixing usage of the encoding-neutral alias with code that not encoding-neutral can lead to mismatches that result in compilation or runtime errors. For more information, see Conventions for Function Prototypes.

Requirements


Minimum supported client	Windows XP [desktop apps \| UWP apps]
Minimum supported server	Windows Server 2003 [desktop apps \| UWP apps]
Target Platform	Windows
Header	fileapi.h (include Windows.h)
Library	Kernel32.lib
DLL	Kernel32.dll