Reliable File.renameTo() alternative on Windows?

For what it's worth, some further notions:

1. On Windows, renameTo() seems to fail if the target directory exists, even if it's empty. This surprised me, as I had tried on Linux, where renameTo() succeeded if target existed, as long as it was empty.

   (Obviously I shouldn't have assumed this kind of thing works the same across platforms; this is exactly what the Javadoc warns about.)

2. If you suspect there may be some lingering file locks, waiting a little before the move/rename might help. (In one point in our installer/upgrader we added a "sleep" action and an indeterminate progress bar for some 10 seconds, because there might be a service hanging on to some files). Perhaps even do a simple retry mechanism that tries renameTo(), and then waits for a period (which maybe increases gradually), until the operation succeeds or some timeout is reached.

In my case, most problems seem to have been solved by taking both of the above into account, so we won't need to do a native kernel call, or some such thing, after all.

The following piece of code is NOT an 'alternative' but has reliably worked for me on both Windows and Linux environments:

public static void renameFile(String oldName, String newName) throws IOException {
    File srcFile = new File(oldName);
    boolean bSucceeded = false;
    try {
        File destFile = new File(newName);
        if (destFile.exists()) {
            if (!destFile.delete()) {
                throw new IOException(oldName + " was not successfully renamed to " + newName); 
            }
        }
        if (!srcFile.renameTo(destFile))        {
            throw new IOException(oldName + " was not successfully renamed to " + newName);
        } else {
                bSucceeded = true;
        }
    } finally {
          if (bSucceeded) {
                srcFile.delete();
          }
    }
}

Well I have found a pretty straight forward solution to this problem -

boolean retVal = targetFile.renameTo(new File("abcd.xyz"));
while(!retVal) {
    retVal= targetFile.renameTo(new File("abcd.xyz"));
}

As suggested by Argeman, you can place a counter and limit the number of times the while loop will run so that it doesn't get into an infinite loop in case of some file are being used by another windows process.

int counter = 0;
boolean retVal = targetFile.renameTo(new File("abcd.xyz"));
while(!retVal && counter <= 10) {
        retVal = targetFile.renameTo(new File("abcd.xyz"));
        counter = counter + 1;
}

I know it sucks, but an alternative is to create a bat script which outputs something simple like "SUCCESS" or "ERROR", invoke it, wait for it to be executed and then check its results.

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmd /c start test.bat");

This thread may be interesting. Check also the Process class on how to read the console output of a different process.

You may try robocopy. This is not exactly "renaming", but it's very reliable.

Robocopy is designed for reliable mirroring of directories or directory trees. It has features to ensure all NTFS attributes and properties are copied, and includes additional restart code for network connections subject to disruption.

To move/rename a file you can use this function:

BOOL WINAPI MoveFile(
  __in  LPCTSTR lpExistingFileName,
  __in  LPCTSTR lpNewFileName
);

It is defined in kernel32.dll.

 File srcFile = new File(origFilename);
 File destFile = new File(newFilename);
 srcFile.renameTo(destFile);

The above is the simple code. I have tested on windows 7 and works perfectly fine.