Greetings, I have discovered a bug in the implementation of remove_all. remove_all works by reading through a directory and deleting entries along the way. If it comes across a subdirectory, it immediately recurses into that subdirectory. However, boost::filesystem uses readdir, which on some platforms (including OS X, apparently) uses a static data area that can be overwritten on each call to readdir. This messes up the original directory iteration, ending up with some entries not being deleted. A solution is to not recurse the directory immediately, but to make a list of them. Once you have gone through all of the entries in a directory, then you recurse into the subdirectories. A patch is below, although it could probably be improved. Cheers, Walter Landry wlandry@ucsd.edu --- /home/boo/arx/arx/src/boost/_arx/++cache/wlandry@ucsd.edu--arx/boost/1/32/,4/libs/filesystem/src/operations_posix_windows.cpp 2005-01-04 14:11:44.000000000 -0500 +++ /home/boo/arx/arx/src/boost/libs/filesystem/src/operations_posix_windows.cpp 2005-01-18 21:16:49.000000000 -0500 @@ -28,6 +28,7 @@ #include <boost/throw_exception.hpp> #include <boost/detail/workaround.hpp> #include <cstring> +#include <list> #ifdef BOOST_NO_STDC_NAMESPACE namespace std { using ::strcmp; using ::remove; using ::rename; } @@ -191,11 +192,23 @@ if ( !fs::symbolic_link_exists( ph ) // don't recurse symbolic links && fs::is_directory( ph ) ) { + std::list<fs::path> dir_list; for ( fs::directory_iterator itr( ph ); itr != end_itr; ++itr ) { - count += remove_all_aux( *itr ); + if(!fs::symbolic_link_exists( ph ) // don't recurse symbolic links + && fs::is_directory( ph ) ) + { + dir_list.push_back(*itr); + } + else + { + count += remove( *itr ); + } } + for(std::list<fs::path>::iterator i=dir_list.begin(); + i!=dir_list.end(); ++i) + count+=remove_all_aux(*i); } fs::remove( ph ); return count;