How to tell why a file deletion fails in Java?

Question

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 1

As pointed out in File.delete()

you may use a SecurityManager that throws the exeception for you.

Answer 2

A deletion may fail due to one or more reasons:

1. File does not exist (use File#exists() to test).
2. File is locked (because it is opened by another app (or your own code!).
3. You are not authorized (but that would have thrown a SecurityException, not returned false!).

So whenever deletion fails, do a File#exists() to check if it is caused by 1) or 2).

Summarized:

if (!file.delete()) {
    String message = file.exists() ? "is in use by another app" : "does not exist";
    throw new IOException("Cannot delete file, because file " + message + ".");
}

Answer 3

Hmm, best I could do:

public String getReasonForFileDeletionFailureInPlainEnglish(File file) {
    try {
        if (!file.exists())
            return "It doesn't exist in the first place.";
        else if (file.isDirectory() && file.list().length > 0)
            return "It's a directory and it's not empty.";
        else
            return "Somebody else has it open, we don't have write permissions, or somebody stole my disk.";
    } catch (SecurityException e) {
        return "We're sandboxed and don't have filesystem access.";
    }
}

Answer 4

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.Path#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.