Deleting some but not all sub directories using Chef

Question

I have several sub-directories inside a parent directory that I need to remove using my cookbook, but there are many other sub-directories I need to keep. Is there a programmatic way I can achieve the delete of certain sub-directories or do I have to manually specify each one that I wish to remove like so;

directory "/var/lib/foo" do
  action :delete
end

Answer 1

You could just specify a desired pattern with a regular expression and delete all (sub)directories matching that pattern.

Something like that:

Dir["/main/{sub1,sub2,sub3}"].each do |dir|
  file ::File.expand_path(dir) do
    action :delete
  end
end

For more information on how to match the desired files using Dir see the Ruby docs on Dir.

This related SO question might also be useful.