delete a file

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: delete a file by reasonablekeith (Deacon) on Jun 16, 2005 at 09:15 UTC
it works fine here. Check your permissions and/or working directory? `#!/usr/bin/perl use Cwd; print getcwd();` [download] --- my name's not Keith, and I'm not reasonable.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: delete a file by TedPride (Priest) on Jun 16, 2005 at 12:33 UTC
Pardon me for asking stupid questions, but why aren't you just using `>` instead of deleting the file and using `>>`?	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: delete a file by jpeg (Chaplain) on Jun 16, 2005 at 09:15 UTC
Maybe your script isn't creating that file where you think it is, or your script isn't in chdir'd to the right directory. Try printing getcwd before creating and deleting and abs_path to the file. both functions are in Cwd.pm. -- jpg	[reply]
Re^2: delete a file by Anonymous Monk on Jun 16, 2005 at 09:19 UTC
cwd prints the location that the script is running from, therefore, the link to delete the file is correct?	[reply]
Re^3: delete a file by jpeg (Chaplain) on Jun 16, 2005 at 09:34 UTC
cwd should match the directory containing the file, for your purposes. Why don't you post the entire script? -- jpg	[reply]
Re: delete a file by Anonymous Monk on Jun 16, 2005 at 10:08 UTC
What happens if you write that as: `if (-e "data/remove.txt") { unlink "data/remove.txt" or die "unable to delete $!"; }` [download] Are you sure you are using the filehandle `>>`? That's a pretty weird name for a filehandle. Or do you mean that you are using the append mode when opening a file? If so, why use append if the file isn't supposed to be there in the first place? It's not wrong (although I'm not sure if opening of a non-existing file using append mode actually works on all platforms), but people usually open a non-existing file in write only mode.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
A reply falls below the community's threshold of quality. You may see it by logging in.
Re: delete a file by kyoshu (Curate) on Jun 16, 2005 at 09:15 UTC
you do not have the file on the system or you are trying to delete file which you can not delete because of file permisions, or you execute your script from some other directory than ../data/. # mkdir dir # touch dir/file # ls dir/ file # perl -e 'unlink "dir/file" or die "failure\n";' # ls dir/ #	[reply]