dbuenzli
Improve `OS.{Dir,Path}.delete ~recurse:true` reliability.
W.r.t. races, see https://github.com/dbuenzli/bos/issues/50#issuecomment-223592710 and discussion in #50.
I think the code in this gist could make an improvement over the current convoluted code.
It should have the reliability @dsheets wanted. It will delete everything in the directory even if someone fiddles with the path and its content; e.g. by removing files, adding files, replacing directories with files and vice-versa (except if the toplevel directory is replaced by a file, it could be made to work by adding a few more cases but I think it's fine that way). This however also means that another process can make this function loop if it manages to be faster.
The strategy is to use rmdir and that whenever a non-empty directory is hit you open it and start unlinking the files, if you hit a directory in this process you close the directory and start deleting that one and come back later to finish your job. Once you manage to delete the contents of a dir you try to rmdir and restart if that is not empty again.
Note that this means that to delete a directory with n subdirs you need to Unix.{open,close}dir at least n times, it's a little bit unclear what the performance impact of this is.
An unscientific benchmark on a large directory indicates that this technique is a bit slower:
> find $(odig cache path) | wc -l
28664
> time rm -r $(odig cache path)
real 0m1.800s
user 0m0.095s
sys 0m1.632s
> time bosrmdirr $(odig cache path) # current bos implementation
real 0m1.994s
user 0m0.131s
sys 0m1.781s
> time b0rmdirr $(odig cache path) # proposed alternative
real 0m2.330s
user 0m0.163s
sys 0m2.103s