From: Walter Landry (wlandry_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-01-19 22:05:58
Beman Dawes <bdawes_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> At 10:58 PM 1/18/2005, Walter Landry wrote:
> >Greetings,
> >
> >I have discovered a bug in the implementation of remove_all.
> >remove_all works by reading through a directory and deleting entries
> >along the way. If it comes across a subdirectory, it immediately
> >recurses into that subdirectory. However, boost::filesystem uses
> >readdir, which on some platforms (including OS X, apparently) uses a
> >static data area that can be overwritten on each call to readdir.
> >This messes up the original directory iteration, ending up with some
> >entries not being deleted.
> >
> >A solution is to not recurse the directory immediately, but to make a
> >list of them. Once you have gone through all of the entries in a
> >directory, then you recurse into the subdirectories. A patch is
> >below, although it could probably be improved.
>
> Walter,
>
> Thanks for the report. As Peter pointed out, that isn't supposed to happen
> on a POSIX compliant system. Is it possible the bug is actually in the
> remove_all code or your code?
I don't think so. The same code works fine on NetBSD, Cygwin, and Linux
(various flavors). It only breaks on OS X.
The particular case causing problems is a directory filled with about
560 subdirectories. It may be that this is a sufficiently rare case
that no one has run into it.
Also, as a point of interest, there is an implementation of remove_all
in C at
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/classes/cs360/360/oldtests/t1/2000/a2.html
It takes the same approach I gave, but also notes that you should
really call chmod on the directories before attempting to delete
anything in them.
> I've had a "to do" item for a month or so to change readdir to readdir_r on
> systems which support it. My guess is that almost all modern POSIX
> operating systems support readdir_r, but there is a configuration macro so
> the code can adapt to what is available. I'm not sure my guesses about
> POSIX are worth anything, however, since I would have guessed every modern
> POSIX OS implements readdir correctly:-( Anyhow, readdir_r should solve
> this problem so I'll accelerate that fix.
That would be great.
Cheers,
Walter Landry
wlandry_at_[hidden]