Missing delete path facility

[Alan Bateman]

Ulf Zibis wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> in the new nio API there is Path#delete(). It only allows to delete a 
> single file or directory if empty.
> If developer wants to delete a complete subtree of a path, he has to 
> programmatically iterate over all its elements.
>
> Please add functionality to save developers from hand-coding those 
> iterations.
This has come up a few times and is a good candidate to add to the Files 
utility class. Like all composite operations, the question arises as to 
what to an operation fails. If you are writing a command-line tool (like 
rm -r) then you would emit a warning message and continue. Other 
approaches are to terminate, or to continue and return a collection of 
the files that could not be deleted (and the reason). But point taken 
that developers shouldn't have to re-invent this. In the mean-time, it's 
actually not that hard and there is a skeleton example in FileVisitor's 
javadoc.

>
> On http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/essential/io/legacy.html in 
> "Mapping java.io.File Functionality to java.nio.file"-table I find:
> |File.delete|  --> |Path.delete| or |Path.delete(boolean)
>
> |But there is no expression for delete(boolean) in current 
> implementation of Path.
Thanks. I think Sharon Zakhour (the tech writer that developed this 
tutorial) has already fixed this one and a couple of other issues. They 
just aren't pushed to java.sun.com yet.

-Alan.