At 12:00 PM +0930 8/30/04, Jeremy Begg wrote:
>  The Perl documentation for unlink() says that it
>shouldn't be used to delete directory files (presumably because Unix handles
>them very differently to normal files).  Is this also true for VMS Perl?
>(Obviously deleting a .DIR;1 file in VMS without first deleting any files in
>the directory is not ideal, but it doesn't break the filesystem.)

I don't know of any reason deleting directories with Perl would have
any caveats you wouldn't also have deleting them any other way.
Perl_kill_file calls the CRTL remove() function, which probably calls
lib$delete_file.  If what you want is to delete a whole directory
tree regardless of whether there are files, subdirectories, etc.,
then have a look at File::Path::rmtree.  One-liners like the
following can be quite handy (though I generally use DFU for this
purpose):

$ perl -e "use File::Path; rmtree([EMAIL PROTECTED],1,0);" [.stuff_to_kill]


-- 
________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
 difficult than getting in."
                 Brad Leithauser

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