The Problem
While working with zip files in WordPress (I’m setting up my own update server and package update process), I manually created a zip file in using 7zip in Windows (my primary operating system) and extracted it via PHP in a Codeanywhere Ubuntu workspace.
The problem was the zip file was created containing Windows paths, so I ended up file with a file name “vylesk-test-plugin\vylesk-test-plugin.txt” and directory name “D:\Temp\php\vylesk-test-plugin\vylesk-test-plugin.1.1\vylesk-test-plugin\“.
Notice the backslashes and “D:” drive path.
Removing the file and directory was a problem.
Attempting to perform a simple rm and rm -rf resulted in:
rm: cannot remove './vylesk-test-plugin\vylesk-test-plugin.txt': Permission denied rm: cannot remove '_temp/vylesk-test-plugin.1.1/D:\Temp\php\vylesk-test-plugin\vylesk-test-plugin.1.1\vylesk-test-plugin\': Permission denied
I tried changing file permissions using chmod and that also resulted in:
chmod: changing permissions of 'vylesk-test-plugin.1.1/D:\Temp\php\vylesk-test-plugin\vylesk-test-plugin.1.1\vylesk-test-plugin\': Operation not permitted chmod: changing permissions of 'vylesk-test-plugin.1.1/vylesk-test-plugin\vylesk-test-plugin.txt': Operation not permitted
The Solution
The solution turned out to be very simple. I just needed to prefix the command with sudo.
So I ended up with:
sudo rm vylesk-test-plugin\\vylesk-test-plugin.txt sudo rm -rf 'D:\Temp\php\vylesk-test-plugin\vylesk-test-plugin.1.1\vylesk-test-plugin\'
The file and directory then deleted successfully (and I didn’t need an su password, which I don’t know anywhere because it’s in a virtual environment I don’t control).
Note 2 other elements of the commands:
- In the first ‘rm’ line the “\\” (double-backslash), because backslashes need to be escaped.
- In the second line I surrounded the directory path with single quotes, an alternative to the double-backslash.