I must be missing something.

UPDATE: I was missing something. As ikegami points out in the comments, rmtree("foo", 0, 0) does the job. That's what I get for not carefully reading the docs.

Why is doing rm -rf, but in perl, so hard? Before you point to rmtree in File::Path, know this:

$ mkdir foo
$ touch foo/bar
$ chmod 444 foo/bar
$ perl -e 'use File::Path "rmtree"; rmtree("foo", 0, 1)'
Can't remove directory foo: Directory not empty at -e line 1
$ ls foo
bar
[download]

Not only did it not remove foo, it threw a warning. I've stepped through rmtree, and I see no flags/args I can set/pass to make it do the right thing. Maybe I've missed it though...

Note how unlike rm -rf this is:

$ rm -rf foo
$ ls foo
ls: foo: No such file or directory
[download]

Yay! It did what I asked and didn't complain.

Path::Class and File::Remove both use File::Path::rmtree underneath, so they're just as unhelpful. So what to do?

use Path::Class;
my $dir = dir('foo');
$dir->recurse(callback => sub {
    unlink $_[0] if !$_[0]->is_dir;
});
$dir->rmtree(0, 1);
[download]

That works, but look how clunky and un-concise it is. I'm not asking it to be as concise as "rm -rf", but surely it should fit on one line. And note how unlink() happliy removes my 444 file, yet rmtree won't even try.

So, here are my requirements:

• 1) fits on one line (the fewer the better)
• 2) DWIMs like `rm -rf $dir`
• 3) cross-platform (so `rm -rf $dir` doesn't count)
• 4) does not fork (so `rm -rf $dir` doesn't count again)
• 5) is immediately clear what it does, just at a glance

Thanks,
Todd

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