At 06:40 AM 1/19/2005, Peter Dimov wrote:
Walter Landry wrote:
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.
This patch would only fix remove_all, but the general case remains broken. A filesystem iterator should not be affected by another filesystem iterator.
Right. I'll add a test case to try to detect that happening.
By the way, POSIX says that readdir can only overwrite the result of readdir on the same directory stream, so OS X seems to be buggy in this regard.
Strange. I wonder if most OS X developers use readdir_r. Otherwise I would think a serious non-compliance in readdir would have been fixed a long time ago. Thanks, --Beman