These system calls are easy to use: just call one or the other with the filename you want to delete or rename. If something goes wrong, the return value is non-zero and errno is set to the appropriate error number. You can use strerror or perror (both declared in <cstdio>) to print out the implementation-defined error message.
To rename a file, you can replace the remove call in Example 10-11 with the following code:
The Boost Filesystem library also provides the ability to remove or rename a file. Example 10-12 shows a short program for removing a file (or directory, but see the discussion after the example).
The important part of Example 10-12 is the remove function. Call it with a valid path argument that refers to a file or an empty directory, and it will be removed. For an explanation of the path class and complete function, both of which are part of the Boost Filesystem library, take a look at the discussion in Recipe 10.7. See Recipe 10.11 for an example of how to remove a directory and all the files it contains.
Renaming a file or directory is similar. Replace the code in the try block in Example 10-12 with this code:
This will rename src to dst, so long as each is a valid path. src and dst don't have to have a common base directory, and in that respect, the rename function logically moves a file or directory to a new base directory, so long as dst exists.