What steps can be taken to troubleshoot errors related to directory deletion in PHP scripts?

When troubleshooting errors related to directory deletion in PHP scripts, one common issue could be that the directory you are trying to delete is not empty. To solve this, you can recursively delete all files and subdirectories within the directory before attempting to delete the directory itself. 

function deleteDirectory($dir) {
    if (!file_exists($dir)) {
        return true;
    }

    if (!is_dir($dir)) {
        return unlink($dir);
    }

    foreach (scandir($dir) as $item) {
        if ($item == '.' || $item == '..') {
            continue;
        }

        if (!deleteDirectory($dir . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . $item)) {
            return false;
        }
    }

    return rmdir($dir);
}

// Usage
$directory = 'path/to/directory';
deleteDirectory($directory);

Keywords

PHP directory deletion troubleshooting error handling file system operations

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