Why is a file not getting deleted using the file.delete() function?

Question

I am using a method to delete a particular pre-existing file using the file.delete() method as follows

public void deleteFile(String fileName)throws IOException  //To refine. Does not work
{
    File file=new File("C:\\File Handling\\"+fileName+".txt");
    boolean success=file.delete();
    System.out.println(success);
}

However success is always returned as false. What is going wrong?

Please advise on how else to delete a file using java.

You might want to add a .exists() check in there and check for write permissions and such first. — Andrew White, Nov 15 '14 at 11:31

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 15 '14 at 11:30

1

On Windows you typically can't delete files that are opened by any process. Also you may want to check if you have permissions by doing the delete from the command line.

answered Nov 15 '14 at 11:30

b4hand

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 15 '14 at 11:32

Your code works perfectly fine on my machine. I just wrapped it in a class and made it static to be called by main()

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        deleteFile("newfile");
    }

    public static void deleteFile(String fileName)throws IOException  //To refine. Does not work
    {
        File file=new File("C:\\File Handling\\"+fileName+".txt");
        boolean success=file.delete();
        System.out.println(success);
    }

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 16 '14 at 05:42

Sometimes windows can be funky about how it handles files try using the method deleteOnExit() method that way you can make sure that the program isn't still open inside your code. Also did you double check that the file isn't open in a different program before running the code?

Why is a file not getting deleted using the file.delete() function?

3 Answers3