Question

In my jUnit, i have a following snippet:

private String  session = "/tmp/session/";
private File    f;

@Before
public void setUp() {
    f = new File(session);
    f.mkdir();
}

@After
public void tearDown() {
    System.out.println("Directory deleted:   " + f.delete()); // always false
}

Meanwhile:

• Directory permissions are ok (drwxr-xr-x)
• Directory contains some files (-rw-r--r--)
• No ownership issues (Creator user deletes)

What would cause for f.delete() to fail? Is f.delete() an equivalent of rm -rf ?

Answer 1

From the API documentation for File.delete:

delete

public boolean delete()
Deletes the file or directory denoted by this abstract pathname. If this pathname
denotes a directory, then the directory must be empty in order to be deleted.
Returns:
true if and only if the file or directory is successfully deleted; false otherwise
Throws:
SecurityException - If a security manager exists and its SecurityManager.checkDelete(java.lang.String) method denies delete

access to the file

Note the bit about the directory needing to be empty.