Re: rmtree() failure on Windows

Tom Lane wrote:

>Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
>
>
>>Before I tried anything like that I tried one more thing. I disabled the
>>background writer and the problem stopped. So now we know the "culprit".
>>
>>
>
>Okay. So what that says is that win32_open's claim to allow unlinking
>an open file is a lie; or at least, it does not work the way the
>equivalent facility on Unix does. It sounds to me like Windows is
>simply marking the open file as to be deleted on last close --- the
>directory entry remains present and so the directory can't be dropped
>either.
>
>

Looks that way to me too.

>One relatively low-impact workaround would be to force a checkpoint
>(on Windows only) during DROP DATABASE, just before we actually fire
>the rmtree() operation. The bgwriter is already coded to close all its
>open files after a checkpoint ...
>
>
>
>

Works for me. If someone gives me a patch I'll be happy to test it.

I did wonder if there should be a call that instead of forcing a flush
could tell bgwriter just to forget about the file(s) because we're
discarding them. But that was just idle speculation - I haven't looked
at bgwriter at all.

cheers

andrew