TL;DR

A basic Perl function to really remove a directory.

While looking at some code in dibspack-basic I hit the following line:

stubborn_rm_rf($dst) if $dst->exists && ! PRESERVE;

I have to say… I think the line says what it does pretty well, and future me congratulates with past me for writing it. I was intrigued though… why stubborn?!?

It turns out that sometimes permissions can get in the way when asking Perl to remove stuff. Which is a feature, not a bug! Alas, sometimes you just want to get rid of the directory and everything it contains, so here comes the stubborness.

The implementation is pretty basic:

sub stubborn_rm_rf {
   my $root = shift;
   $root->chmod('u+rwx');
   for my $child ($root->children) {
      if    (-l $child) { $child->remove }
      elsif (-d $child) { stubborn_rm_rf($child) }
      else {
         $child->chmod('u+rw');
         $child->remove;
      }
   }
   $root->remove_tree;
}

Reading it after some time, I was a bit surprised that I coded a recursive function. I usually avoid them, but I guess that in this case I wasn’t anticipating too much of a drag.

Still, it’s not entirely satisfactory and general (although, I have to admit, it does its job perfectly in the context I coded it in the first place). One thing is that it only accepts directories, and the other is that it’s recursive. Let’s try to code something different then:

 1 sub stubborn_rm_rf {
 2    my @queue = @_; # multiple files accepted!
 3    while (@queue) {
 4       my $file = path(shift @queue);
 5       if    (-l $file) { $file->remove }
 6       elsif (-d $file) {
 7          $file->chmod('u+rwx'); # enable all for the user
 8          my $n = scalar @queue;
 9          push @queue, $file->children;
10          if ($n == scalar @queue) { $file->remove_tree }
11          else                     { push @queue, $file }
12       }
13       else {
14          $file->chmod('u+rw');
15          $file->remove;
16       }
17    }
18    return;
19 }

A classic way of transforming a recursion into an iteration is to re-implement the stack mechanism. In this case we can do something simpler and just keep a @queue of files that have to be deleted (independently of their nature), stopping when there’s nothing more to act upon.

We make sure that we work with a Path::Tiny object (line 4) and then basically replicate the old function, except for the directory part where we are eliminating the recursion call.

When we hit a directory, we must first empty it, then remove it. So, in a sense, we might have to defer an operation onto the directory until everything inside has been removed. How to do this?

In line 8 we save how many items are in @queue - just the count of them, in variable $n. After this, we add all children in @queue, scheduling their removal.

Now there can be two cases:

• there were no children in the directory, which means that @queue remained the same after line 9, OR
• there were children and @queue grew a bit.

In the first case, we can safely get rid of the directory (line 10), in the second case we just re-add the directory to the queue (line 11), so that it will be processed again in the future, but after all of its children have been removed.

So… it should just work. 🙄