How to Remove a Non-Empty Folder in Python? – Be on the Right Side of Change (2024)

Problem Formulation:

• Given a path to 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.dat

You 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 given path. The topdown=False argument 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 location root + name where name is the file suffix (e.g., 'file.dat') and root is the path to this file (e.g., '/path/to/file/').
• The os.rmdir(os.path.join(root, name)) method removes the folder at the location root + name where name is the folder suffix (e.g., 'file.dat') and root is 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 folderdel_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?

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