Recursive file delete in C on Linux

Question

I have a C program that, at one point in the program has this:

system("rm -rf foo");

Where foo is a directory. I decided that, rather than calling system, it would be better to do the recursive delete right in the code. I assumed a piece of code to do this would be easy to find. Silly me. Anyway, I ended up writing this:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <dirent.h>
#include <libgen.h>

int recursiveDelete(char* dirname) {

  DIR *dp;
  struct dirent *ep;

  char abs_filename[FILENAME_MAX];

  dp = opendir (dirname);
  if (dp != NULL)
    {
      while (ep = readdir (dp)) {
        struct stat stFileInfo;

        snprintf(abs_filename, FILENAME_MAX, "%s/%s", dirname, ep->d_name);

        if (lstat(abs_filename, &stFileInfo) < 0)
          perror ( abs_filename );

        if(S_ISDIR(stFileInfo.st_mode)) {
          if(strcmp(ep->d_name, ".") && 
             strcmp(ep->d_name, "..")) {
            printf("%s directory\n",abs_filename);
            recursiveDelete(abs_filename);
          }
        } else {
          printf("%s file\n",abs_filename);
                  remove(abs_filename);
        }
          }
      (void) closedir (dp);
        }
  else
    perror ("Couldn't open the directory");


  remove(dirname);
  return 0;

}

This seems to work, but I'm too scared to actually use it in production. I'm sure I've done something wrong. Does anyone know of a C library to do recursive delete I've missed, or can someone point out any mistakes I've made?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I would suggest one additional precaution that you can take.

Almost always when you delete multiple files and/or directories it would be a good idea to chroot() into the dir before executing anything that can destroy your data outside this directory.