Last updated on November 17, 2022
The following tutorial describes how to delete files and directories that you no longer need in your application. Removing a single file in Ruby is simple and straightforward, with File.delete
. This method Deletes the named files, returning the number of names passed as arguments. Raises an exception on any error.
File.delete(path_to_file) if File.exist?(path_to_file)
Removing a directory tree is also straightforward and simple with FileUtils.remove_dir
, which recursively deletes the contents of a directory. This method ignores StandardError if force(second parameter) is true.
FileUtils.remove_dir(path_to_directory) if File.directory?(path_to_directory)
Ruby provides several methods for removing directories, but mostly we use remove_dir. Dir.delete and FileUtils.rmdir will only work if the directory is already empty. The rm_r and rm_rf defined in FileUtils are similar to remove_dir.