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25.10 Creating and Deleting Directories

Most Emacs Lisp file-manipulation functions get errors when used on files that are directories. For example, you cannot delete a directory with delete-file. These special functions exist to create and delete directories.

— Command: make-directory dirname &optional parents

This command creates a directory named dirname. If parents is non-nil, as is always the case in an interactive call, that means to create the parent directories first, if they don't already exist.

mkdir is an alias for this.

— Command: delete-directory dirname

This command deletes the directory named dirname. The function delete-file does not work for files that are directories; you must use delete-directory for them. If the directory contains any files, delete-directory signals an error.

delete-directory only follows symbolic links at the level of parent directories.