# this works:
rm foo
# versus this, which doesn't:
rm foo/
Basically, you need to tell it to delete a file, not delete a directory. I believe the difference between rm
and rmdir
exists because of differences in the way the C library treats each.
At any rate, the first should work, while the second should complain about foo being a directory.
If it doesn’t work as above, then check your permissions. You need write permission to the containing directory to remove files.