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

I was reading in the Camel that it is dangerous for the file structure to unlink a directory rather than use rmdir.

This made me wonder if it is necessary to empty a directory of files by using unlink, before using rmdir, or whether the command rmdir took care of unlinking the files. If this is not the case would the process fail or could the directory delete leaving the file structure in limbo?

Just generally interested - thanks for any enlightenment.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: unlink and rmdir
by ysth (Canon) on Nov 30, 2003 at 11:57 UTC
    perldoc -f rmdir says it deletes only if the directory is empty. To delete a non-empty directory, use: 
    use File::Path;
rmtree($dir, 0, 1);

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    See perldoc File::Path for details.
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      Just another 'TAMTOWTDI'. I know this is non-portable, but on unix machines, I am most likely going to do something like this instead -
      system("/bin/rm -rf $dir");

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      or simply
      `/bin/rm -rf $dir`;

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Re: unlink and rmdir
by calin (Deacon) on Nov 30, 2003 at 16:34 UTC
    unlinking a directory doesn't work on Linux and other modern operating system. It is an ancient UNIXism.

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