Remove all files in a directory

os.remove() does not work on a directory, and os.rmdir() will only work on an empty directory. And Python won't automatically expand "/home/me/test/*" like some shells do.

You can use shutil.rmtree() on the directory to do this, however.

import shutil
shutil.rmtree('/home/me/test') 

be careful as it removes the files and the sub-directories as well.

os.remove doesn't resolve unix-style patterns. If you are on a unix-like system you can:

os.system('rm '+test)

Else you can:

import glob, os
test = '/path/*'
r = glob.glob(test)
for i in r:
   os.remove(i)

Bit of a hack but if you would like to keep the directory, the following can be used.

import os
import shutil
shutil.rmtree('/home/me/test') 
os.mkdir('/home/me/test')

Because the * is a shell construct. Python is literally looking for a file named "*" in the directory /home/me/test. Use listdir to get a list of the files first and then call remove on each one.

This will get all files in a directory and remove them.

import os

BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
dir = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "foldername")

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(dir):
  for file in files:
    path = os.path.join(dir, file)
    os.remove(path)

star is expanded by Unix shell. Your call is not accessing shell, it's merely trying to remove a file with the name ending with the star

shutil.rmtree() for most cases. But it doesn't work for in Windows for readonly files. For windows import win32api and win32con modules from PyWin32.

def rmtree(dirname):
    retry = True
    while retry:
        retry = False
        try:
            shutil.rmtree(dirname)
        except exceptions.WindowsError, e:
            if e.winerror == 5: # No write permission
                win32api.SetFileAttributes(dirname, win32con.FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL)
                retry = True

os.remove will only remove a single file.

In order to remove with wildcards, you'll need to write your own routine that handles this.

There are quite a few suggested approaches listed on this forum page.

To Removing all the files in folder.

import os
import glob

files = glob.glob(os.path.join('path/to/folder/*'))
files = glob.glob(os.path.join('path/to/folder/*.csv')) // It will give all csv files in folder
for file in files:
    os.remove(file)