From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2003-10-08T15:42:04+09:00
Subject: Re: How to delete read-only files with Ruby commands

> All-
>
> On a Windows NT system, is there a way to quickly delete directories
> (from within a Ruby script) that may have read-only files in them. The
> command I've been using is
>
>    File.delete(*Dir["*.*"])
>
> but this crashes when it hits a RO file.
>
> Similarly, is there a way to force the overwriting of a RO file? I've
> been using File.syscopy, but this, too, crashes when attempting to
> overwrite an RO file.
>
> Thanks!
>
> -Kurt Euler

Try the standard library file 'fileutils.rb'.  You can RDoc the file to
see some documentation or (of course) look at the file directly.

From memory:

  require 'fileutils'

  FileUtils.rm_rf(directory)               # trash a directory tree
  FileUtils.cp(src, dest, :force => true)  # copy over a RO file

These use Unix names, but I imagine it will work on Windows.

Gavin