Removing folders from my rails app with rake

Question

I'm trying to remove the tmp/letter_opener folder. Everything works fine, just wondering if there's a better way to write it. My next step is to write some tests, to double check that I can only accept those inputs (currently failing)

#my_rake_task.rake
namespace :cleanup do
desc 'Deletes the emails inside tmp/letter_opener folder.'
task letter_opener_emails: :environment do
start_time = Time.current
Rails.logger.info "Task starting at #{start_time}."
puts "Task starting at #{start_time}."
print 'About to remove the tmp/letter_opener folder. Press [Nn] to abort. Press [Yy] to continue.'
option = STDIN.gets.strip
case option #[FIXME]: Not deleting the folders
 when /[^Nn]/ then FileUtils.rm_r(Dir.glob('tmp/letter_opener/*'))
 puts 'Directory contents removed'
 when /[^Yy]/ then 'Exiting the task now.' 
 # abort_message
end
end

• Aleksei Matiushkin: Sidenote: option is handled in exactly opposite way.

Answer 1

As mudasobwa's comment says, you're using the case statement backwards. And wrongly.

You're checking if input contains letters that are not n or N, and if that's true, you delete stuff. So I could type foobar, and it'd delete files. Bad.

Even if I type exit or quit or whatever else to stop the task, it'll happily delete stuff. Even typing cancel would be interpreted as "yes, please delete stuff", since - though it contains an "n" - it contains lots of letters that are not "n".

You also have a (dead) branch for not typing y or Y, though that makes no sense. And you don't have an else branch - not that you need one, but it'd make more sense.

You have a fixme you haven't fixed. Your indentation is missing or wrong. Your message ("About to remove the tmp/letter_opener folder.") doesn't match what the code does.

In all, it's not great.

All you need is this:

namespace :cleanup do
 desc 'Deletes the emails inside tmp/letter_opener folder.'
 task letter_opener_emails: :environment do 
 puts "Remove tmp/letter_opener? [yn]"
 if STDIN.gets.chomp =~ /^y$/i
 FileUtils.rm_r("tmp/letter_opener")
 else
 puts "Aborting"
 end
 end
end

• intercoder: thanks I'm still a newbie on this and I knew my regexp and the code logic was "passable", but definitely not great. Thanks once again.