unlink (Unix)

In Unix-like operating systems, unlink is a system call and a command line utility to delete files. The program directly interfaces the system call, which removes the file name and (but not on GNU systems) directories like rm and rmdir.^[1] If the file name was the last hard link to the file, the file itself is deleted as soon as no program has it open.^[2]

It also appears in the PHP, Node.js, R, Perl and Python standard libraries in the form of the unlink built-in function. Like the Unix utility, it is also used to delete files.^[3][4][5][6]

Example

To delete a file named foo, one could type:

% unlink foo 

In PHP, one could use the following function to do the same:

unlink("foo"); 

The Perl syntax is identical to the PHP syntax, save for the parentheses:

unlink "foo"; 

In Node.js it is almost the same as the others:

fs.unlink("foo", callback); 

In R (with the S language compatibility):

unlink("foo") #Comment: using the inside argument 'recursive = TRUE', directories can be deleted 

Similarly in Python:

os.unlink("foo") 

See also

• List of Unix commands
• link (Unix)
• ln (Unix)

References