Mac Forum / Programming / Perl / September 2007

I have a bit of a curiosity here with a script I've been working on  
and am hoping that some others may have experienced and found a  
solution to a similar script portability issue.

The script in question is intended to run on OS X Perl and WinXP  
ActiveState PERL.
It seems simple enough

1) test if a directory exists
2) if so, remove it.

The $buildDir variable is set based upon which OS the script is  
running on.

For example:

# define build dir path
if ($runOS eq "win"){
    $buildDir = "\\\\.PSF\\builds\\$version";
} else {
    $buildDir = "/builds/$version";
}

# test for dir and remove if it exists
if ( -d $buildDir) {
           # using File::Path here for directory removal
            use File::Path;
            rmtree $buildDir,1,0;
}

Everything works as expected on OS X, but on WinXP, rmtree seems to  
fail with the following error...

    Can't call method "rmtree" without a package or object reference

The rmtree method is the only place I seem to have trouble in my script.

Many other operations in the script that use the $buildDir variable  
to copy files into the build directory, or move it around, etc work  
both on OS X and WinXP.

I'm sure I can work around the problem by just using system(rm -r  
$buildDir) and system(del /S $buildDir) ... but I'd like to figure  
out if I'm actually doing something wrong with File::Path's rmtree or  
if the issue is more because of ActiveState PERL+Windows.

Any ideas out there?

Thanks in advance!

-jim-

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