CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubyrecursiondirectoryrmdir
user137369
user137369

Reputation: 5705

Improving recursive `rmdir` in ruby

I have a lot of directories that are empty, save for other empty directories inside them. They are also mixed with other directories that do have files in them, so I want to only delete the empty directories and their (now empty) parents.

I’ve come up with this:

empty_dirs = -> { Dir.glob("#{dir}/**/*").select { |d| File.directory?(d) && Dir.empty?(d) } }
empty_dirs.call.each { |d| Dir.rmdir(d) } until empty_dirs.call.empty?

This works fine, but I was wondering if there’s a standard way — like FileUtils.rmdir_r(dir) — instead of having to write a loop.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 459

Answers (1)

Aleksei Matiushkin
Aleksei Matiushkin

Reputation: 121000

Dir.rmdir is a wrapper for shell’s rmdir which fails when the directory is not empty (ruby version raises an exception)

Errno::ENOTEMPTY: Directory not empty @ dir_s_rmdir

One might take advantage of this

Dir.glob("#{dir}/**/*").
  select(&File.method(:directory?)).
  sort_by(&:length).  # to start as deep as possible
  reverse.         # longest first 
  each do |directory|
    Dir.rmdir(directory) rescue :skipped 
  end

Upvotes: 3

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