Cannot delete folder with rm -rf. Error: device or resource busy

Question

I'm trying to delete /var/www/html but I'm getting this error:

rm: cannot remove `html': Device or resource busy

Solution 1

I was having the same issue, I was trying and failing to delete

/usr/local/tomcat/data

with the error rm: cannot remove/usr/local/tomcat/data': Device or resource busy`

until I noticed that df -h said

/dev/vda3              20G  172M   20G   1% /usr/local/tomcat/data

that is, I had a partition mounted to that point. Mystery solved.

Solution 2

You can use lsof or fuser to indentify which is using this directory, something like this:

# lsof +D /var/www/html

Solution 3

It's likely that there is a process running that is using a file or files found somewhere in the tree below /var/www/html

try

lsof +D /var/www/html

to get a list of the processes using files in the tree. Sample output below shows that a bash shell with PID 8138 is using /var/www/html/iain.

COMMAND  PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE    NODE NAME
bash    8138 iain  cwd    DIR  253,0 4096 1982790 /var/www/html/iain

Comments

[jgoldschrafe]

Long shot, but do you have /var/www/html configured as a mount point for another filesystem?

[Apealed]

Nothing shows up. No errors or anything.

[user9517]

try /sbin/fuser -m /var/www/html

[Jake Levi]

If you want to actually unmount the partition, see advice in this comment: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/11238/…