Problem Formulation:
- Given a
pathto a folder as a Python string. The folder is non-empty. - How to remove the whole folder in your Python script?
Example: Say, you have the path='path/to/folder' in your Python script and it contains some files and subfolders:
path
--to
----folder
------file1.dat
------file2.dat
------subfolder1
--------file3.dat
------subfolder2
--------file4.datYou want to remove all the bold content in the previous example folder structure.
Method 1: Remove Files At Once with shutil.rmtree()
The module shutil provides a function rmtree() that removes all folders and files recursively from a given path.
import shutil # String path of folder to be removed: path = 'path/to/folder' # Remove the folder recursively: shutil.rmtree(path)
The shutil.rmtree() function deletes the entire directory tree at the provided path pointing to a directory (not a file or a symbolic link of a directory).
Note that read-only files cannot be removed from a folder using this utility because they are, well, read only. That’s why it’ll throw an error when you try to remove read-only files. If you want to remove the remaining folder contents regardless, you need to set the optional argument ignore_errors.
shutil.rmtree(path, ignore_errors=True)
However, the read-only files won’t be removed in any case!
Method 2: Remove Files Individually with os.walk()
A more fine-grained approach is provided by the os.walk() function:
import os
# String path of folder to be removed:
path = 'path/to/folder'
# Remove the folder by walking through the files (from the bottom up):
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(path, topdown=False):
for name in files:
os.remove(os.path.join(root, name))
for name in dirs:
os.rmdir(os.path.join(root, name))
ATTENTION: Before using this code make sure it’s tailored to your specific problem as it can potentially remove all files in your operating system if you specify your top-level path as ‘/’ or any other root path in your specific operating system.
- The
os.walk(path, topdown=False)method provides an iterator over all files at the givenpath. Thetopdown=Falseargument ensures that you move from the bottom up, i.e., you first remove all the contents of a folder before deleting the folder itself. - The
os.remove(os.path.join(root, name))method removes the file at the locationroot + namewherenameis the file suffix (e.g.,'file.dat') androotis the path to this file (e.g.,'/path/to/file/'). - The
os.rmdir(os.path.join(root, name))method removes the folder at the locationroot + namewherenameis the folder suffix (e.g.,'file.dat') androotis the path to this file (e.g.,'/path/to/file/').
Method 3: Walking over Files and Folders Using pathlib
import pathlib
# String path of folder to be removed:
path = 'path/to/folder'
# Remove the folder
del_folder(path):
for sub in path.iterdir():
if sub.is_dir():
# Delete folder if it is a folder
del_folder(sub)
else :
# Delete file if it is a file:
sub.unlink()
# This removes the top-level folder:
path.rmdir()
del_folder(pathlib.Path(path))
Resources:
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/303200/how-do-i-remove-delete-a-folder-that-is-not-empty
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1557351/python-delete-non-empty-dir
Where to Go From Here?
Enough theory, let’s get some practice!
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