Re: rmtree() failure on Windows

Tom Lane wrote:

>Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
>
>
>>Here is some more info. Below is a trace from dropdb. There is a loop
>>around the rmdir() calls which I have set to time out at 600 seconds.
>>The call eventually succeeds after around 300 seconds (I've seen this
>>several times). It looks like we are the victim of some caching - the
>>directory still thinks it has some of the files it has told us we have
>>deleted successfully.
>>
>>
>
>If you rescan the directory after deleting the files, does it show
>as empty?
>
>

No! That's how I got the list of "files it still thinks are there".
Gross, eh?

>
>
>>Bottom line, this is a real mess. Surely postgres is not the only
>>application in the world that wants to be able to delete a directory
>>tree reliably on Windows. What do other apps do?
>>
>>
>
>I'm wondering if this is a side effect of the way win32_open does
>things. It's hard to believe that rmdir is that bogus in general,
>but perhaps win32_open is causing us to exercise a corner case?
>
>
>
>

I don't know. I tried to reproduce it in a simple case using
fopen/fclose and wasn't able to.

cheers

andrew