Re: How do I delete a directory without emptying it first?

[trala]

Okay, just came up with this for a script I am working on. If this is really stupid, please someone let me know!

use File::Find;

finddepth (\&remove_dir, "$directory");
rmdir ( "$directory" ) or die ("Could not remove $directory");

sub remove_dir
{
  # for a directory, this will be 0
  if ( ! (stat("$File::Find::name"))[7] ) 
  { rmdir("$File::Find::name"); }
  else
  { unlink("$File::Find::name"); }
}

In theory, finddepth will find the deepest items first (files inside the directories). Once the files are unlinked, the directories will be empty and can be removed.

[gav^]

To make your example a bit shorter you could go for:

use File::Find;
finddepth( sub { (-d) ? rmdir : unlink }, $directory);

But I would recommend using File::Remove as per my example.

gav^