Well here I am replying to my own post. I don't have a solution to the problem I reported, but I did find an alternative solution.
I used method finder to find methods with the #String 'delete' in them. The class #OSProcess contains a method #deleteFileNamed: which was just what I needed. Provide a fully qualified file name as the argument and it gets deleted. e.g. "OSProcess deleteFileNamed: 'C:\MediaVault\BBC\test.txt'"
I developed and tested this on 5.2-64 on Windows. 7
-jrm
On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 3:38 PM John-Reed Maffeo jrmaffeo@gmail.com wrote:
This seems strange, when I run the command: ExternalWindowsOSProcess command: 'del "C:\MediaVault\BBC\test.txt"'
I get an error, with or without double quotes around the file name.
It is strange because I use it three times in my method. The first two invocations launch external programs with long command strings. They work fine, but when I want to clean up, the process fails. The test case above, executed from Workspace, fails consistently.
It fails in 5.2/64 and 5.2.32
I have not tried it in older versions
Image
C:\Smalltalk\Squeak5.2alpha-18110-64bit-201804030952-Windows\Squeak5.2alpha-18110-64bit\Squeak5.2alpha-18110-64bit.1.image Squeak5.2alpha latest update: #18110 Current Change Set: BBCRR-RestartAt5.2alpha Image format 68021 (64 bit)
-jrm