Unlink symlinked directory target

[maherbeg]

When a clean is invoked on a symlinked folder, the symlink still appears in the folder but in a broken state. Could the clean target automatically unlink the folder?

Would something like this make more sense as a user filter? If so, could examples using symlinks be shown as well?

Thanks!

[arcanis]

Up. Contrib clean is currently not able to delete symlinks. Maybe adding an option would be enough without breaking BC ?

[dazld]

also want this.

[jamesplease]

Update: I'm thinking this might be relevant. When I made a working symlink it cleaned just fine. Here's an example that will create a symlink that can be removed, and one that can't.

If this is the case, the issue is more a matter of reporting bad symlinks.

---

What OS are y'all using?

I'm working on a fix for this for OSX. Here's what I know so far:

grunt-contrib-clean is just a wrapper around isaac's rimraf, and rimraf has no problem deleting symlinks. So the issue is with grunt-contrib-clean, or maybe even node.

The first problem is this if statement. grunt.file.exists relies on fs.exists, which seems to return false for symlinks – or at least the symlink that I've made. I'm thinking this check can be removed altogether. (Note: ref this issue which suggests that exists should work for symlinks)

The second issue is this line. grunt.file.isPathInCwd depends on fs.realpath, which throws the following error when I pass my symlink's path as the argument:

Error: ELOOP, too many symbolic links encountered

I thought that this might be relevant, but it's only throwing the error with the node function. Everything else seems a-okay.

If anyone else has any ideas, feel free to chime in. Otherwise I'll look more into this sometime soon.

---

Note to self: using fs.lstatSync(filepath).isSymbolicLink() could be useful.

[vladikoff]

@jmeas is this related to gruntjs/grunt#1069 ?

[jamesplease]

Only as far as them both involving symlinks. This is a bug with bad symlinks, I think, and that's adding new functionality to grunt.

[vladikoff]

@jmeas ah both involve changes to the grunt.file module