Daniel Pope <lord.ma...@gmail.com> added the comment:

This would be a shortcut in the common case that you simply want an idempotent 
"make sure this file/symlink is gone" operation.

There are already boolean options to enable idempotent behaviour in several 
pathlib implementations, such as mkdir(exist_ok=True) and touch(exist_ok=True). 
write_bytes() and write_text() are also idempotent. unlink() aligns well with 
this.

Because this operation doesn't exist, developers are tempted to write

    if path.exists():
        path.unlink()

which both has a TOCTTOU bug and doesn't correctly handle symlinks.

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Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue33123>
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