From: Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@...>
Date: 2007-04-09T05:05:00+09:00
Subject: Re: File.delete -> Permission denied

Alle domenica 8 aprile 2007, Antoine De Groote ha scritto:
> Hello,
>
> I'm new to Ruby (coming from Python) and I already have trouble.
>
> The following code (on Windows XP, Ruby 1.8.5):
>
> Dir.chdir 'c:/documents and settings/antoine/desktop'
> Dir.mkdir 'test'
> Dir.chdir 'test'
> %w{ a b c }.each { |f| File.open(f+'.txt', 'w').close }
> Dir.foreach('.') { |f| File.delete f }
>
> throws this error message:
>
> problem.rb:5:in `delete': Permission denied - . (Errno::EACCES)
>          from problem.rb:5
>          from problem.rb:5:in `foreach'
>          from problem.rb:5
>
> I've tried to find an answer to this strange behaviour for a couple of
> hours now, but I can't find one. Could anybody point me to a solution of
> the problem?
>
> Kind regards,
> antoine

I can see a problem in your code, but I'm not sure whether or not it's related 
to the error you get (I don't have use windows, so I can't test). Dir.foreach 
passes to the block also '.' and '..', which represent respectively the 
current directory and its parent. File.delete can't deal with directories 
(and at any rate, I don't think you want to delete the current directory), so 
it raises an exception. On linux, trying to use File.delete on a directory 
raises a Errno::EISDIR exception, but since exceptions in the Errno module ar 
operating system-dependent, it may be that in windows it raises a 
Errno::EACCES exception.

I hope this helps

Stefano