Re: "tidy" not deleting files from the future

[Paul Krizak]

Perhaps "scale" isn't the best term.  The "scaling" I was referring to 
is the amount of code complexity for what should be an incredibly simple 
operation.  For every file/directory you want to delete, whereas it 
should require only one extra line in a tidy: statement, setting classes 
and stuff to do the same thing means adding (at a minimum) two lines of 
code (one to set the class, one to delete the file), not to mention the 
fact that you now have the same information ("This file will be 
deleted") in three places: a shellcommands block, a classes: block, and 
implicitly through the definition of the class.

It shouldn't be necessary to resort to a shellcommand or extra classes 
just to force a file to disappear from the system.  "age=0", to me, 
means "no matter how old it is, delete it!", aka "force".

Unfortunately that is not the case.  While I have workarounds in place 
for situations like the one I describe here, I would like to see future 
versions of cfengine do the "right thing" in this situation, or at least 
provide some way of letting "tidy" throw caution to the wind and just 
blow away whatever files it is told to.

"disable" sounds like a suitable workaround for some things (though I do 
not know if it is susceptible to the time shift problem), but there are 
many cases where I just want the file *gone*.

Paul Krizak                         5900 E. Ben White Blvd. MS 625
Advanced Micro Devices              Austin, TX  78741
Linux/Unix Systems Engineering      Phone: (512) 602-8775
Microprocessor Solutions Sector


Brendan Strejcek wrote:
> Paul Krizak wrote:
>
>
> > yeah that's not exactly what I'm looking for either. It doesn't scale
> > at all for large groups of files, nevermind big trees of stuff (for
> > example, we delete /usr/local, all of it, during install).
>
>
> How does tidy scale better? You could use IsDir rather than FileExists
> along with the -r option or "find" with some criteria and a -exec
> option.
>
> Here is a hack to get a big recursive delete to return quickly:
>
>     /bin/sh -c '( /bin/rm -rf /some/path & )'
>
>
> > Usually when we need to do a true "force" of a delete, we just do a
> > shellcommand of rm -f, and let it keep trying to delete the missing
> > files forever.
>
>
> Hmm, I would at least wrap it with a class like my previous example.
>
>
> > I'd much rather use tidy in all situations, however.
>
>
> "disable" might also be an option.
>
> Best,
> Brendan
>
> --
> Senior System Administrator
> The University of Chicago
> Department of Computer Science
>
> http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/people/brendan
> http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~brendan