Permission denied rm a symlink I own on OSX 10 The output below confirms to me that "emp1" the current user own the symlink "npm", thus I should be able to rwx all day if I want to.  

Why am I getting Permission denied when trying to remove it?  Thanks

~$ whoami
empl1
~$ ls -la /usr/local/bin/
lrwxr-xr-x   1 empl1  staff  38 26 Dec 16:02 npm -&gt; ../lib/node_modules/npm/bin/npm-cli.js
~$ rm /usr/local/bin/npm 
rm: /usr/local/bin/npm: Permission denied
Only users with write access to a directory can remove its content. In your case you can check with ls -ld /usr/local/bin who the owner of this directory is. And than either switch to this user or use sudo rm /usr/local/bin/npm to remove the link.