What does ShFileOperation do when the recycle bin is full?

Question

I use this procedure:

function MoveToRecycle(sFileName: widestring): Boolean;
var
  fos: TSHFileOpStructW;
begin
  FillChar(fos, SizeOf(fos), 0);
  with fos do
  begin
    wnd := 0;
    wFunc  := FO_DELETE;
    pFrom  := PWideChar(sFileName + #0 + #0);
    pTo := #0 + #0;
    fFlags := FOF_FILESONLY or FOF_ALLOWUNDO or FOF_NOCONFIRMATION or FOF_SILENT;
  end;
  Result := (ShFileOperationW(fos) = 0);
end;

What will happen if the recycle bin is full, does it return false or delete file permanently ?

Any help would be appreciated.

Sectional

Indent your code by four spaces to get it to show up correctly. – Currie

I wasn't aware that the Recycle Bin can be "full". How does that work? – Wretched

By the way - nice function. Actually good to know how to move to the recycle bin. I always just used "deletefile" function. – Frisco

Mason - you can set the recycle bin to be a "percentage" of your disk drive space. But we I learned, using this function at least, it never fills up, but instead pushes out the oldest deleted files when there is no more free capacity left. – Frisco

By the way, you are triple null-terminating the path. You've got one more null than you need. – Polydeuces

Answer 1

The best way to find out is to actually do it. Made my recycle bin be minimum 1 percent of drive. Created a bunch of large files and used your function to move them to recycle bin.

What I am finding out (on XP anyways) is that the function always moves it to the recycle bin; but deletes permanently the oldest deleted file. So it appears when the recycle bin fills up it employs a "first in - first out" type approach to decide which file to boot out.

I was not able to get the function to return false. Perhaps creating a file too large for the allocated recycle bin do this.

Frisco

If it's so important for your customer to keep the files in their recycle bin, why doesn't he just remove the recycle bin limit? – Barthel

He is a regular user, so I guess he doesn't aware about that – Sectional