I know that soundfiler essentially reads and writes .aiff files by copying into and out of arrays.

Is there a way to delete files from within a running PD patch without using a dialogue box?

Here is the problem I'm trying to solve:

I have a 16 track looper which uses a combination of delay lines as buffers and self-overwriting arrays for the loops. I have 100 save slots where you can save tracks (copy the arrays to .aifff files), then load those .aiffs into the track arrays.

All of this uses hardware and does not use any screens, keyboards or mice. The problem is that those 100 slots fill up quickly, so I'd like to be able to delete the contents of slots -- again, this needs to be "automatic" without using any dialogue boxes or anything like that. It's easy to keep track of the names, they would just be 0-100.aiff, essentially. So I would know I want to delete 4.aiff for example. Is there a way to do that?

Thank you!

@Tombot7 you could overwrite the existing .aiff with a zero size .aiff with soundfiler.

@Jona Thanks! I didn't realize that. I can probably cook up a solution using that.

Don't forget that the new pd-0.52 have the [file] family objects, could be as simple as using [file delete] then.

@60hz Nice, now I can even delete my OS with PD (just a joke).
First time I read about [file]. Sounds useful.

I didn't know about file. It looks perfect. I didn't even know about PD 52. I'm using purr-data nw.js version 0.24.5 on linux - mostly because it includes limiter~ and z~. It does not seem to have file. Maybe there's an update out there? Or, I could probably just pull in limiter and z to vanilla.