Hi Monks, I'd like to delete a complete path which sits on an NFS export, and the network is slightly unreliable.
33 use File::Path qw(make_path remove_tree); [...] 387 $result = eval { remove_tree "/path/to/tree"; }; [...]
Sometimes this fails due to network outages. In this case, the whole script dies:
cannot remove directory for /path/to/tree Directory not empty at /path/to/script line 387.
How can that be - remove_tree is trapped with eval¹? How can I make the script stay alive? What I want to do is to retry every second to remove the path until it's gone. However, this works:
387 $result = system( "rm -rf /path/to/tree" );
rm also complains from time to time that the directory is not empty, but at least the script stays alive, and I can retry. It then always succeeds on the second attempt. I never need a third one. But I obviously want to avoid the system call with it's fork.

So what is that makes remove_tree feel so unhappy?

Thanks.

¹ I have read http://perldoc.perl.org/File/Path.html which tells me that it might be a bad idea to trap remove_tree, but in my case I think it's OK.


In reply to remove_tree dies even when trapped with eval by Alphaphi

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.