File won't dessapear.

[Punto]

I have a program that writes to a temp. file, and then deletes it. I do this:

unlink ($path) || die "Couldn't unlink $path\n";

($path is the name of the file). The program doesn't die, but after I run it, the file still exists.. Does that make sense?

Thanks..

[muppetBoy]

Not sure why the file has not disappeared - could it be a permissions problem?
Unlink will return the number of files successfully deleted, you could try:

$cnt = unlink ($path);

And check $cnt is what you would expect.
Also, what is your OS, I'm not sure if unlink works on Win32. Although this could well be wrong.

[ZZamboni]

No, it doesn't. A few things to check:
• Does $path contain the full path of the file, or the correct relative path wrt the current directory for the program?
• Do you have permissions to delete it? (if the same program created it, I would guess so, but permissions could always change in the middle)
• Is that line actually being executed? Try inserting print statements before and after it, to verify that.

--ZZamboni

[perlcgi]

Just two suggestions:
1. If on Unix, have you checked the directory permissions - you need write access to the directory as well as to the file. Could you have created the temp file originally as a different user?
2. Are you sure as ZZ pointed out that $path contain the full path of the file. unlink will only delete directories if run as root.