How do I remove/delete a folder that is not empty?

import shutil

shutil.rmtree('/folder_name')

Standard Library Reference: shutil.rmtree.

By design, rmtree fails on folder trees containing read-only files. If you want the folder to be deleted regardless of whether it contains read-only files, then use

shutil.rmtree('/folder_name', ignore_errors=True)

From the python docs on os.walk():

# Delete everything reachable from the directory named in 'top',
# assuming there are no symbolic links.
# CAUTION:  This is dangerous!  For example, if top == '/', it
# could delete all your disk files.
import os
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(top, topdown=False):
    for name in files:
        os.remove(os.path.join(root, name))
    for name in dirs:
        os.rmdir(os.path.join(root, name))

I'd like to add a "pure pathlib" approach:

from pathlib import Path
from typing import Union

def del_dir(target: Union[Path, str], only_if_empty: bool = False):
    """
    Delete a given directory and its subdirectories.

    :param target: The directory to delete
    :param only_if_empty: Raise RuntimeError if any file is found in the tree
    """
    target = Path(target).expanduser()
    assert target.is_dir()
    for p in sorted(target.glob('**/*'), reverse=True):
        if not p.exists():
            continue
        p.chmod(0o666)
        if p.is_dir():
            p.rmdir()
        else:
            if only_if_empty:
                raise RuntimeError(f'{p.parent} is not empty!')
            p.unlink()
    target.rmdir()

This relies on the fact that Path is orderable, and longer paths will always sort after shorter paths, just like str. Therefore, directories will come before files. If we reverse the sort, files will then come before their respective containers, so we can simply unlink/rmdir them one by one with one pass.

Benefits:

• It's NOT relying on external binaries: everything uses Python's batteries-included modules (Python >= 3.6)
  • Which means that it does not need to repeatedly start a new subprocess to do unlinking
• It's quite fast & simple; you don't have to implement your own recursion
• It's cross-platform (at least, that's what pathlib promises in Python 3.6; no operation above stated to not run on Windows)
• If needed, one can do a very granular logging, e.g., log each deletion as it happens.

if you are sure, that you want to delete the entire dir tree, and are no more interested in contents of dir, then crawling for entire dir tree is stupidness... just call native OS command from python to do that. It will be faster, efficient and less memory consuming.

RMDIR c:\blah /s /q 

or *nix

rm -rf /home/whatever 

In python, the code will look like..

import sys
import os

mswindows = (sys.platform == "win32")

def getstatusoutput(cmd):
    """Return (status, output) of executing cmd in a shell."""
    if not mswindows:
        return commands.getstatusoutput(cmd)
    pipe = os.popen(cmd + ' 2>&1', 'r')
    text = pipe.read()
    sts = pipe.close()
    if sts is None: sts = 0
    if text[-1:] == '\n': text = text[:-1]
    return sts, text


def deleteDir(path):
    """deletes the path entirely"""
    if mswindows: 
        cmd = "RMDIR "+ path +" /s /q"
    else:
        cmd = "rm -rf "+path
    result = getstatusoutput(cmd)
    if(result[0]!=0):
        raise RuntimeError(result[1])

Ten years later and using Python 3.7 and Linux there are still different ways to do this:

import subprocess
from pathlib import Path

#using pathlib.Path
path = Path('/path/to/your/dir')
subprocess.run(["rm", "-rf", str(path)])

#using strings
path = "/path/to/your/dir"
subprocess.run(["rm", "-rf", path])

Essentially it's using Python's subprocess module to run the bash script $ rm -rf '/path/to/your/dir as if you were using the terminal to accomplish the same task. It's not fully Python, but it gets it done.

The reason I included the pathlib.Path example is because in my experience it's very useful when dealing with many paths that change. The extra steps of importing the pathlib.Path module and converting the end results to strings is often a lower cost to me for development time. It would be convenient if Path.rmdir() came with an arg option to explicitly handle non-empty dirs.

Recursion-based, pure pathlib solution:

from pathlib import Path

def remove_path(path: Path):
    if path.is_file() or path.is_symlink():
        path.unlink()
        return
    for p in path.iterdir():
        remove_path(p)
    path.rmdir()

Supports Windows and symbolic links

With os.walk I would propose the solution which consists of 3 one-liner Python calls:

python -c "import sys; import os; [os.chmod(os.path.join(rs,d), 0o777) for rs,ds,fs in os.walk(_path_) for d in ds]"
python -c "import sys; import os; [os.chmod(os.path.join(rs,f), 0o777) for rs,ds,fs in os.walk(_path_) for f in fs]"
python -c "import os; import shutil; shutil.rmtree(_path_, ignore_errors=False)"

The first script chmod's all sub-directories, the second script chmod's all files. Then the third script removes everything with no impediments.

I have tested this from the "Shell Script" in a Jenkins job (I did not want to store a new Python script into SCM, that's why searched for a one-line solution) and it worked for Linux and Windows.

For Windows, if directory is not empty, and you have read-only files or you get errors like

• Access is denied
• The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process

Try this, os.system('rmdir /S /Q "{}"'.format(directory))

It's equivalent for rm -rf in Linux/Mac.

It helps to delete a directory with all files and folders

import os


def rrmdir(path):
    for entry in os.scandir(path):
        if entry.is_dir():
            rrmdir(entry)
        else:
            os.remove(entry)
    os.rmdir(path)

I have found a very easy way to Delete any folder(Even NOT Empty) or file on WINDOWS OS.

os.system('powershell.exe  rmdir -r D:\workspace\Branches\*%s* -Force' %CANDIDATE_BRANCH)

In my case the only way to delete was by using all possibilities because my code was supposed to run either by cmd.exe or powershell.exe. If it is your case, just create a function with this code and you will be fine:

        #!/usr/bin/env python3

        import shutil
        from os import path, system
        import sys

        # Try to delete the folder ---------------------------------------------
        if (path.isdir(folder)):
            shutil.rmtree(folder, ignore_errors=True)

        if (path.isdir(folder)):
            try:
                system("rd -r {0}".format(folder))
            except Exception as e:
                print("WARN: Failed to delete => {0}".format(e),file=sys.stderr)

        if (path.isdir(self.backup_folder_wrk)):
            try:
                system("rd /s /q {0}".format(folder))
            except Exception as e:
                print("WARN: Failed to delete => {0}".format(e),file=sys.stderr)

        if (path.isdir(folder)):
            print("WARN: Failed to delete {0}".format(folder),file=sys.stderr)
        # -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can try the code below to delete files or folders regardless of whether them being empty or non-empty.

import shutil
import os

directory = "path/to/the/root/folder"
files_in_directory = os.listdir(directory)

for file in files_in_directory:
    try:
        path_to_file_or_folder = os.path.join(directory, file)
        shutil.rmtree(path_to_file_or_folder)
    except:
        os.unlink(path_to_file_or_folder)