I checked Bleach.pm and find that it does overwrite the existing script contents (which is what I expected). Perl having the script file open doesn't prevent this from happening.
You mean opening $0 for writing will overwrite the existing file's contents, and although Perl may still have it open, the way it was opened doesn't prevent it from being opened for writing (at least by the same process or same security context). I suppose that the normal ">" mode of Perl truncates the file to zero length.

But, in Win32, the deleting of a file is prohibited if it's open at all, regardless of what sharing modes are specified.

In my experience of saving changes to a PM while it was still running, when the editor saves by writing to a temp file first, then if successful deleting the old and renaming the new, would fail if __DATA__ was being used. The fact that it may close or leave open, depending, explains differing observations on the subject. I thank you for sheding light on this.

So you might have to chdir("..") under Win32 and even that might not be enough.
It should be enough, unless spawned tasks are still using it. It's enough for that script.

Then again, under Win32 you can also use Win32API::File to request that files/directories that are currently in use be deleted during the next reboot.
The mechanism is totally different for NT/2000 than it is for Win 3.1/95/98/ME. The function in Win32API::File is only present on the former.
Finally, the reason that you can't delete the Perl script while Perl still has it open is because the C run-time library under Win32 defaults to specifying sharing of "rw" and not "rwd". I wish they had opted for "rwd", but my time machine is still broken.
Are you sure that's possible on Win32? If it's just a matter of the defaults passed to the underlying functions, you could change the Perl source.

—John

In reply to Re: (tye)Re: Self Deletion by John M. Dlugosz
in thread Self Deletion by Anonymous Monk

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