What a safe and easy way to delete a dir in Ruby?

Question

I'd like to delete a directory that may or may not contain files or other directories. Looking in the Ruby docs I found Dir.rmdir but it won't delete non-empty dir. Is there a convenience method that let's me do this? Or do I need to write a recursive method to examine everything below the directory?

Answer 1

The laziest way is:

def delete_all(path)
    `rm -rf "#{path}"`
end

Answer 2

On non-Windows systems, the following will work:

system("rm -rf #{dir}")

Answer 3

require 'fileutils'

FileUtils.rm_rf(dir)

Answer 4

A pure Ruby way:

require 'fileutils'

FileUtils.rm_rf("/directory/to/go")

If you need thread safety: (warning, changes working directory)

FileUtils.rm_rf("directory/to/go", :secure=>true)