Hi all you lispers,
I posted a similar question to the CMU-CL implementation
mailing list, but I thought I would get a more general consensus
on what is thought of my problem (or if I'm missing something
altogether)
I need to be able to delete directories. I figure well
delete-file should do the trick. Unfortunately delete-file, in
the CMU-CL implementation (and also, as I'm told, the ACL
implementation) does not allow directories to be deleted. I
searched in vain for some portable alternative (I'm aware of the
unix:unix-rmdir syscall allowed in CMU-CL).
I read the hyper-spec and it says that delete-file
deletes a file (duh!). Is it stretching it for delete-file to
delete special files? Is the ANSI spec clearer as to the
behaviour? Am I missing something obvious? Is there some kind
of consensus as to how to deal with this issue?
I appreciate any responses. ;)
Gavin E. Gleason
In article <··············@tvi.cc.nm.us>,
Gavin E. Gleason <········@tvi.cc.nm.us> wrote:
> I read the hyper-spec and it says that delete-file
>deletes a file (duh!). Is it stretching it for delete-file to
>delete special files? Is the ANSI spec clearer as to the
>behaviour? Am I missing something obvious? Is there some kind
>of consensus as to how to deal with this issue?
The text of the ANSI spec is 99% identical to the HyperSpec. In virtually
all ways except legal issues you can probably consider them equivalent. So
it's no more or less clear.
I don't think we ever discussed this issue at all in X3J13, so there's no
obvious concensus. The issue of what an is considered to be a "file" is
inherently implementation-dependent. For instance, some systems will let
you open a directory for reading; in some versions of Unix, it depends on
the file system type (you can read a local directory as if it were a file,
but not one on a network server).
--
Barry Margolin, ······@bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Cambridge, MA
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