You can maybe save yourself some trouble by not forking to the system shell like that.

First of all, if you use the multi arg version system you'll have less interpolation trouble to avoid (e.g., system("del", $file)==0 or die).

Second, try out unlink. It probably does that better anyway. I'm not a windows guy (which is the only platform where this kind of timing "issue" is a problem), but I think you can do something like this: 

for my $file (@files) {
   my $retries = 2;

   JUST_TRY_ME: {
       unless( unlink $file ) {
           if( (--$retries) > 0 ) {
               warn "problem unlinking file ($file): $!"; sleep 2;
               redo JUST_TRY_ME;

           } else {
               die "too many problems unlinking file ($file) ...";
           }
}

[download]

UPDATE: holi is probably right... you probably just need to close first.

-Paul

In reply to Re: Odd Timing Executing Lines of Code by jettero
in thread Odd Timing Executing Lines of Code by ~~David~~

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.