What is the Perl way of removing a directory and then all empty parent directories up to the first non-empty one? In other words, what could one use instead of:
system 'rmdir', '-p', $directory;
which, in starting with d, would first remove d and then c, and then b, but not a, since a would still contain x, like this:
a
a/b
a/b/c
a/b/c/d
a/x
resulting in
a
a/x
It's not the built-in rmdir, as it can only remove a single directory. (doc)
It's not finddepth ( sub {rmdir}, '.' ), using File::Find, as it removes children, not parents. (doc)
It's not the remove_tree function of the File::Path module either, since it not only removes children directories but files as well. (doc)
Notice, remove_tree and finddepth work in the opposite direction of Bash rmdir --parent.
use Path::Tiny qw( path );
my $p = path('a/b/c/d');
while (!$p->is_rootdir()) {
if (!rmdir($p)) {
last if $!{ENOTEMPTY};
die("Can't remove \"$p\": $!\n");
}
$p = $p->parent;
}
Notes:
Efficient. By checking the result of rmdir instead of using ->children or ->iterator, this solution is avoids needless calls to readdir.
No race conditions. Unlike the solutions that use readdir (via ->children or ->iterator), this solution doesn't suffer from a race condition.
This solution also avoids the redundant -d check used by an earlier solution.
This solution, unlike those before it, will handle a tree that's empty except for the directories to remove.