Issue #18784 has been updated by deivid (David Rodríguez). I realized I never replied to latest objections from @mame to this feature. My use case is to make sure temporary test files and folders are cleaned after each test, because if they are not cleaned the following tests may not work as expected, since they rely on starting with an empty tmp folder. I'm not sure if that's "1) delete target at all costs" or "2) delete target if possible". I think it's "2), but raise an error if not possible". The kind of swallowed issues I've run into in the past are things like: * Keyword vs positional parameter error due to accidentally using a version of FileUtils not supported by my version of Ruby. * ENAMETOOLONG errors due to a bug in Ruby. Things I definitely wanted to know about because they made my tmp test folder not removed and affected subsequent specs in hard to debug ways. For these issues, `FileUtils.rm_rf` raising an error and not swallowing it would've helped, I didn't need any further retry/sleep/chmod manipulations, and they would have not helped my use case (because they would have not made any difference). By the way, I believe `FileUtils.rm_rf` on Windows seems to already have some of this chmod+retry behaviour @mame was mentioning: https://github.com/ruby/fileutils/blob/636975a184f07ccef31a0ffd9412be8fbb75e.... I don't need nor like this behavior, but just mentioning it. In any case, I decided to stick to using `FileUtils.rm_r` and make sure I don't pass folders that don't exist as targets. That already has the exact behavior I'm asking for, so I'm fine with this issue being closed. ---------------------------------------- Feature #18784: `FileUtils.rm_f` and `FileUtils.rm_rf` should not mask exceptions https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18784#change-112511 * Author: deivid (David Rodríguez) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- In recent times, I've been having issues with these methods because they don't let you know when some issue happened while trying to remove the given folders/files. IMO most users expect all pre-existing folders/files that are passed to these methods to be actually removed by the methods. Instead, when this happens, errors are silently swallowed and normally the result is that you will get some other issue further down the road, making the problem hard to debug. The current workaround I'm using is to double check whether the files still exist after the method, and raise a custom error if they do, but I still can't see the original problem, so issues are similarly hard to debug. This is also a deviation from how `rm -rf` and `rm -f` work, since these tools finish with a failure exit code when they fail to remove the given files. Given that `fileutils` is intended to mimic shell functionality, I think this is just a bug. I think the intention of the `force` flag here is to: * Don't prompt for confirmation. * Ignore given arguments that are not files that already exist. But any issue other than that should not be swallowed, and in general I think the method should succeed if and only if the given list of file names does not exist after the methods are done. I think this is in line with the following note I get when I run `man rm`, but also suggests that this is not the standard behavior of "historical implementations"

COMPATIBILITY

The rm utility differs from historical implementations in that the -f option only masks attempts to remove non-existent files instead of masking a large variety of errors.

I implemented this at https://github.com/ruby/fileutils/pull/58, but treating this as a bug. I can also implement a more conservative for approach for users that might be using `FileUtils.rm_rf` or `FileUtils.rm_f` but don't really care if the files are removed or not. Alternative proposals would be `FileUtils.rm_rf(force: strict)`, or `FileUtils.strict_rm_rf`, but to be honest, if this is considered a breaking change, I would ship it as a new major version, and let users update their code to swallow errors themselves if they need to. Happy to hear any feedback! -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/