O Monks,

Emphasis should be on the "seems to" in the topic ...

Every once in a while -- er, more often than I care to admit, really -- I find myself staring at code that I vow USED to work and suddenly DOESN'T any more, despite the fact (?) that I can't remember having done anything to it.

Here is an example: I have written a script to uncover dead symbolic links, delete them and report on what was deleted. If run in '--test' mode, it simply reports out the presence of the dead links.

The problem is that the script is finding and reporting out the dead links I am creating for my testing, but when I run the script "for real", e.g. to have it delete the links, it emails a report that claims the links were deleted ... and when I go to the supposedly cleaned directory, the dead links are still there.

Here is the code that handles the deletion:

find( \&wanted, @directories );

sub wanted {
  -l && !-e && ( ( push @msgs, "$File::Find::name" ) && $counter++ );
  ( -l && !-e && unlink "$File::Find::name" ||
       croak "Warning: couldn't unlink $File::Find::name:$OS_ERROR\n" 
+) unless $param{test};
  return;
}

[download]

... When I run the script from the CL, I don't get an error output saying the links can't be deleted, either. Nothing. Everything works fine except the links ... aren't being deleted.

If anyone has any insight into this, I'd appreciate it. Not that it matters, but I swear this used to work ...

Thanks,

GB

In reply to 'unlink' seems to not work correctly ... by chexmix

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