Re: dired-kill-tree

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

Miles Bader wrote:

   On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 04:19:03PM -0500, Luc Teirlinck wrote:
   > But you have to understand that this assumes that DIRNAME is a
   > directory name and not a directory file name.  Otherwise, DIRNAME _is_
   > killed.  Anybody having taken any look at the Dired Elisp code will
   > probably have no trouble guessing this implicit assumption.

   Is there a (reasonable) reason for this rather odd behavior?

Tecnically because:

  (setq dirname (expand-file-name dirname))

and later:

      (if (and (not (string-equal dir dirname))

(then we do _not_ delete DIR).

DIR is a directory name.  If DIRNAME is not, then DIR and DIRNAME are
not string-equal.

This bug can trivially be fixed by changing:

  (setq dirname (expand-file-name dirname))

into:

  (setq dirname (file-name-as-directory (expand-file-name dirname)))

That would be an obvious alternative patch.  (Leaving the docstring
unchanged.)  Somehow, the buggy behavior turns out (at least in my
usage) to be useful interactively.

Sincerely,

Luc.