Re: Deleting files

Bart Lateur wrote:

Anders F wrote:

Is there a Perl subroutine for deleting files?

There's a builtin. It's called "unlink".

http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/unlink.html

The reason for the odd name is because on Unix, there's no garantee that
if you succesfully apply this function on a file, that it will indeed be
deleted. There' something called a "hard link", so there can be multiple
directory entries, possibly in more than one directory, for the same
file. "unlink" will remove one such directory entry (called a "link").

Only when all links are gone, will the file contents indeed be deleted.

And indeed, when the final handle to the file is closed:

eg:

open F, ">Somefile";
unlink "Somefile";

print F "Wibble\n"; # File data exists, but there is no way to re-open
# it as the directory entry has gone. However, F may be cloned or passed to
# a sub process via fork().

close F; # Now the file goes away

Cheers

Tim
.

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