in reply to Unlink not deleting, Threading issue?

Greetings, pimperator.

I'm gonna have to go with the file probably has a handle open on it. But I don't quite know what type of system you're attempting to do this on -- *NIX, Win*, {...}. Win* ain't got a (native) unlink (that I can recall). But of course, all the *NIX's do have unlink. I'm also not familiar with the peculiars with Perl on Win, and unlink. But the doc's say:

On error, unlink will not tell you which files it could not remove. If you want to know which files you could not remove, try them one at a time: 
    foreach my $file ( @goners ) {
    unlink $file or warn "Could not unlink $file: $!";
    }

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You will also need to pass -U flag to Perl.

If nothing else. Now you can at least attempt to track the unlinking of the files, to see why/what's going on.

Best wishes.

--Chris

¡λɐp ʇɑəɹ⅁ ɐ əʌɐɥ puɐ ʻꜱdləɥ ꜱᴉɥʇ ədoH

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Re^2: Unlink not deleting, Threading issue?
by dave_the_m (Monsignor) on Jun 05, 2014 at 07:03 UTC
    You will also need to pass -U flag to Perl.
    No you won't. Unless the OP is trying (as root) to direcltly unlink a directory on an ancient UNIX variant, the -U flag is irrelevant.

    Dave.

[reply]
      Greetings, dave_the_m.

      The OP (pimperator) mentions Super User twice in the post.

      “...the user has super-user privileges...”
      and
      “After doing some reading I see that unlink() will not work if the file is open or if the user doesn't have superuser privileges, which is not the case for both.”
      Which is why I felt it pertinent to mention the -U flag.

      --Chris

      ¡λɐp ʇɑəɹ⅁ ɐ əʌɐɥ puɐ ʻꜱdləɥ ꜱᴉɥʇ ədoH

[reply]
        But the -U flag is only for unlinking directories, not files, and even then it only works on a few ancient UNIX variants. Systems like Linux don't allow you unlink() directories with or without -U.

        And unless there's some documentation I missed, -U does not affect whether Windows can unlink opened files.

        Dave.

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Re^2: Unlink not deleting, Threading issue?
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jun 06, 2014 at 16:57 UTC
    ack, no! One uses -U when one wants to unlink directories, which is never! Use rmdir to remove directories. Don't use -U!
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Re^2: Unlink not deleting, Threading issue?
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 07, 2014 at 16:37 UTC

    This is very dangerous advice. If someone did as you suggested and actually managed to unlink a directory, it would probably damage their filesystem.

    The worst part is that you copy/pasted the how to do it parts while leaving out the big red flags that are trying to keep us from doing something stupid and tragic.

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