Question

I am having a simple problem that I cannot find a simple solution to. I am trying to delete a file permanently. I’m not looking for the fanciest way to make the data unrecoverable, I just don’t want it sitting in the Recycle Bin. I have two questions.

1. Is the a way to get the path to the Recycle Bin? The idea is that once I have the path I can use remove() to delete it permanently from there. The following fails for me, returning a completely different path that isn’t that of the Recycle Bin. Maybe I am missing an argument.

   char RecycleBin[_MAX_PATH];   
   SHGetSpecialFolderPath(NULL, RecycleBin, CSIDL_BITBUCKET, FALSE);
   

2. Is there a win32api call to permanently delete a file?

Thanks for reading.

EDIT 1:

Per the answer below, I have been using the _unlink () function but it’s behavior doesn’t do exactly what I want it to do. I need something to get the Desktop, then add a file to that string and pass the string into a function that will delete the file as an argument. Here is how I am trying with unlink.If I do unlink like this – it works:

     char path [] = "C:\\Users\\testuser\\Desktop\\test.dat";

     _unlink( path );

However, if I try it in the two following ways it fails.

    char DesktopPath[_MAX_PATH];

    SHGetSpecialFolderPath(NULL, DesktopPath, CSIDL_DESKTOPDIRECTORY, FALSE);

    strcat ( DesktopPath, "\\test.dat" );

    _unlink ( DesktopPath );

This way (adding quotes) also fails.

    char DesktopPath[_MAX_PATH];

    char final_path [] = "\"";

    char quotes [] = "\"";

    SHGetSpecialFolderPath(NULL, DesktopPath, CSIDL_DESKTOPDIRECTORY, FALSE);

    strcat ( DesktopPath, "\\test.dat" );

    strcat ( DesktopPath, quotes );

    strcat ( final_path, DesktopPath );

    _unlink ( final_path );

Both of the above ways compile and run fine, but it doesn’t actually get rid of the file. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Use the POSIX function unlink (_unlink for MSVC2005+).

_unlink("file.ext"); //delete file without sending to Recycle Bin