Cleaning Up Temporary Files
Discover how to clean up temporary files in your Go command-line applications by using the os.Remove function deferred for safe file deletion. Understand the challenges of race conditions and implement a simple delay to ensure file access before deletion. This lesson helps you maintain system cleanliness and resource management in your tools.
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Overview
Currently, our program doesn’t clean up the temporary files because the method we used to create them doesn’t automatically clean them up. As we can see, running the tool multiple times creates different files:
This is expected as the program can’t know how and when the files will be used. It’s our responsibility to delete the temporary files to keep the system clean.
In our program, we can use the function os.Remove() to delete the files
when they’re no longer needed. In general, we defer the call to this function using the defer statement to ensure the file is deleted when the current function
returns.