Removing readonly files on windows with std.file

[Patrick Schluter]

On Saturday, 7 March 2020 at 22:51:46 UTC, Dominikus Dittes 
Scherkl wrote:
> On Saturday, 7 March 2020 at 20:01:07 UTC, Jonathan Marler 
> wrote:
>> We could modify std.file.remove to be able to remove readonly 
>> files, but maybe there's use cases where people want the 
>> removal to fail if it is marked as readonly?
>
> I always thought "readonly" was intended to protect from 
> "modification" not from "deletion", so simply making the 
> function consistent with the explorer would be the right thing 
> to do.
> It's like a "const" variable: you cannot change its value, but 
> of course you should be able to free the memory it occupies if 
> it goes out of scope or is otherwise detectable not used 
> anymore.

Microsoft says [1]
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_READONLY
A file that is read-only. Applications can read the file, but 
cannot write to it or delete it. This attribute is not honored on 
directories.

So the behaviour of del or the explorer is violating theur own 
definition.


[1]: 
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/file-attribute-constants