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Re: Bug in rm -r with locked files


At 08:44 2003-01-22, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Gael Mulat wrote:

>     OK. If I summurize all that has been said, this problem is
> well-known but has no solution in a near future.
>
>     But a workaround would be very useful for people (me and Brian
> Kelly, for instance) who use plenty of rm -rf in cross-platform shell
> scripts.
>
>     Thanks to Shankar Unni, I have mine: I didn't noticed that only rm
> -rf had the trouble, and not rm -r.
>
>     So my workaround will be to replace all the '/bin/rm -rf dir' by
> 'chmod -R +w dir; /bin/rm -r dir'. The semantic is not exactly the same
> (especially on write-protected directories), but that will allow my
> scripts to work well...
>
>     Thanks everybody.
> Gael.

A suggestion:

'/bin/find dir -depth -exec /bin/chmod +w {} \; -exec /bin/rm -r {} \;'
might work, and will only parse the tree once...  It will invoke chmod and
rm multiple times, though, but that's a tradeoff.
    Igor

Igor,

I think we've drifted off the problem here. This isn't a issue of file modes interfering with file removal, its an interaction with window's "locking" of files that are in-use (open).

And as the discussion from last April showed, not all in-use states interfered with removal via Cygwin unlink(). While we were having trouble getting my original problem reproduced, I decided to write a Java program that opened a file and kept it open. Something about the way Java opened files triggered the problem where not all other uses did.

Perhaps it was just a Cygwin (non-interfering) vs. non-Cygwin (interfering) use of the file. I don't know. I don't know what was the exact diagnosis of the problem at the level of the Cygwin unlink code.

Chris January might know.

Randall Schulz

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