The UNIX command rm -rf for node.

Install with npm install rimraf, or just drop rimraf.js somewhere.

API

rimraf(f, [opts], callback)

The first parameter will be interpreted as a globbing pattern for files. If you want to disable globbing you can do so with opts.disableGlob (defaults to false). This might be handy, for instance, if you have filenames that contain globbing wildcard characters.

The callback will be called with an error if there is one. Certain errors are handled for you:

• Windows: EBUSY and ENOTEMPTY - rimraf will back off a maximum of opts.maxBusyTries times before giving up, adding 100ms of wait between each attempt. The default maxBusyTries is 3.
• ENOENT - If the file doesn't exist, rimraf will return successfully, since your desired outcome is already the case.
• EMFILE - Since readdir requires opening a file descriptor, it's possible to hit EMFILE if too many file descriptors are in use. In the sync case, there's nothing to be done for this. But in the async case, rimraf will gradually back off with timeouts up to opts.emfileWait ms, which defaults to 1000.

rimraf.sync

It can remove stuff synchronously, too. But that's not so good. Use the async API. It's better.

CLI

If installed with npm install rimraf -g it can be used as a global command rimraf <path> [<path> ...] which is useful for cross platform support.

mkdirp

If you need to create a directory recursively, check out mkdirp.

Electron Usage

Electron monkey-patches the 'fs' module to support .asar archives - because of this any 'fs' api calls to an .asar file (or even a file named *.asar) fail. In this case here, if you try to run rimraf from Electron on a folder containing an .asar file inside, the process will fail. In order to support this, we detect for process.versions.electron and require('original-fs'), an unmodified version of the 'fs' library.

More info:

• https://github.com/88dots/extract-zip
• electron/electron#2035 <= possible workaround
• electron/electron#1658
• electron/electron#782