From: Daniel Berger <djberg96@...>
Date: 2007-06-05T02:15:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Deleting a file - is there a less clumsy way to do this?

On Jun 4, 9:26 am, "Ronald Fischer" <ronald.fisc...@venyon.com> wrote:
> > > Basically, I am doing something like this:
>
> > > if File.exist?(filename)
> > >   File.unlink(filename)
> > > end
>
> > You can get it down to one line by doing this:
>
> > File.delete(filename) if File.exist?(filename)
>
> > That doesn't look so bad.  :-)
>
> Well, I'm not so much concerned about the *lines* of code,
> but of the complexity, in particular since this variation
> requires to name "filename" twice.
>
> (side note: why does this remind me to the ongoing thread
> "Introducing the "it" keyword".....  ;-)
>
> In Perl for instance, I would simply write
>
>   unlink filename;
>
> and implicitly void the result...
>
> Ronald

Note that this approach would silently fail on MS Windows if another
process had an open handle on the file in question, i.e. the file
_does_ exist, but you did not delete it.

Regards,

Dan