File won't dessapear.

Punto has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a program that writes to a temp. file, and then deletes it. I do this:

unlink ($path) || die "Couldn't unlink $path\n";
[download]

($path is the name of the file). The program doesn't die, but after I run it, the file still exists.. Does that make sense?

Thanks..

Comment on File won't dessapear. Download Code

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Re: File won't dessapear. by ZZamboni (Curate) on Jun 01, 2000 at 17:47 UTC
No, it doesn't. A few things to check: Does $path contain the full path of the file, or the correct relative path wrt the current directory for the program? Do you have permissions to delete it? (if the same program created it, I would guess so, but permissions could always change in the middle) Is that line actually being executed? Try inserting print statements before and after it, to verify that. --ZZamboni	[reply]
RE: File won't dessapear. by muppetBoy (Pilgrim) on Jun 01, 2000 at 17:45 UTC
Not sure why the file has not disappeared - could it be a permissions problem? Unlink will return the number of files successfully deleted, you could try: `$cnt = unlink ($path);` [download] And check $cnt is what you would expect. Also, what is your OS, I'm not sure if unlink works on Win32. Although this could well be wrong.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: File won't dessapear. by perlcgi (Hermit) on Jun 01, 2000 at 17:55 UTC
Just two suggestions: 1. If on Unix, have you checked the directory permissions - you need write access to the directory as well as to the file. Could you have created the temp file originally as a different user? 2. Are you sure as ZZ pointed out that $path contain the full path of the file. unlink will only delete directories if run as root.	[reply]