From: Antoine De Groote <antoine@...>
Date: 2007-04-09T20:15:13+09:00
Subject: Re: File.delete -> Permission denied

Thanks everybody,

'.' and '..' effectively where the source of the problem.

Kind regards,
antoine

Stefano Crocco wrote:
> 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
>