The following tutorial describe how to delete files and directories that you no longer need in your application. Removing 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.
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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.
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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.