Self Deleting an application

[francy thattil]

Plz. can anyone help me in deleting the application file after it has been closed.
I know I can use deleteOnExit() of java.io.File, but it doesn't seem to work in Windows.

[R Jelda]

Hi,
why don't you delete the file in finalize() method of the Application class.
Regards,
Jelda

[Antoine Waugh]

heyas,
please note:
the finalize method is not necessarily going to be executed. it can/will be run by the JVM just before garbage collection, but unless you remove all ties to the object's reference, and manually call System.gc() then there is no garentee that this approach will work.
-twans

[Robert Paris]

You can't do that. Anything that is being run cannot be deleted as it is a process in use. What you could do (and this is dirty, bad architecture) is use Runtime.exec() to (on windows) use the "AT" command to schedule a delete command on your java code files. Again, this is not the best idea and it's platform dependant (so you'd have to have a way to do this on linux too - cron would do it).

[Stan James]

Can you launch the program from a bat or sh file?

java MyProgram
erase MyProgram.class
erase this.bat   <- I think you can do this in Windows bat

[francy thattil]

Since I wanted an Application, I had created a .jar file with all .class files bundled in it. And i tried assigning a reference to this .jar file and use deleteOnExit() i.e.
import java.io.*;
public class DeleteMe {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Throwable {
File f = new File("DeleteMe.jar");
f.deleteOnExit();
}
}
But, still it does not budge(gets deleted) and remains still on the file system.

[Ram Mohan]

Originally posted by Stan James:
Can you launch the program from a bat or sh file?

java MyProgram
erase MyProgram.class
erase this.bat   <- I think you can do this in Windows bat

actually i it is del MyProgram.class & del this.bat ---> this may work(not too sure)

[himanshu patel]

Originally posted by Ram Mohan:

java MyProgram
erase MyProgram.class
erase this.bat   <- I think you can do this in Windows bat

<hr></blockquote>
actually i it is del MyProgram.class & del this.bat ---> this may work(not too sure)[/QB]

erase and del both will work.