Strax-Haber, Matthew (LARC-D320) wrote:
A folder is created during object instantiation. This is necessary because
multiple other methods depend on the existence of that folder, and in the
future things may be running in parallel so it has to be there for the
entire life of the object. Before the object is deleted, I want that temp
folder to be deleted (ala shutil.rmtree). Is there a better way to do this?
It sounds like the object has 2 functions, namely managing your temp disk
space, and the functionality of whatever the other methods of the object do.
I would suggest to split the temp disk space management to a seperate function
that acts as a kind of main function:
def main():
# make temp disk space
obj = YourObject()
obj.doit() # Run the application
# Application is finished here, cleanup the disk space.
This gives you explicit control when the disk space is cleared.
For a multi-threaded app you may want to wait somewhere until all threads are
finished before proceeding to clean up the disk.
Regardless of whether I should be using __del__, can anyone explain this to
me (to satisfy curiosity):
My class sub-types dict. In __init__, there is a call to
self.update(pickle.load(<some file>)). For some reason, this triggers
__del__. Why?
Somewhere an instance is created and garbage collected.
This is why you really don't want to use __del__. It is very good way to make
your app behave strangely and give you weeks of debugging fun :p
Albert
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