How to tell why a file deletion fails in Java?

java file-io error-handling jdk1.6 jdk6
Arne Evertsson picture Arne Evertsson · Nov 13, 2009 · Viewed 42.6k times · Source 
File file = new File(path);
if (!file.delete())
{
    throw new IOException(
        "Failed to delete the file because: " +
        getReasonForFileDeletionFailureInPlainEnglish(file));
}

Is there a good implementation of getReasonForFileDeletionFailureInPlainEnglish(file) already out there? Or else I'll just have to write it myself.

Answer

jarnbjo picture jarnbjo · Nov 13, 2009

In Java 6, there is unfortunately no way to determine why a file cannot be deleted. With Java 7, you can use java.nio.file.Files#delete() instead, which will give you a detailed cause of the failure, if the file or directory cannot be deleted.

Note that file.list() may return entries for directories, which can be deleted. The API documentation for delete says that only empty directories can be deleted, but a directory is considered empty, if the contained files are e.g. OS specific metadata files.

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