Can't remove a folder with os.remove (WindowsError: [Error 5] Access is denied: 'c:/temp/New Folder')

user_1543010 0
Viewed 87710

I'm working on a test case for which I create some subdirs. However, I don't seem to have the permission to remove them anymore. My UA is an Administrator account (Windows XP).

I first tried:

folder="c:/temp/" 
for dir in os.listdir(folder): 
    os.remove(folder+dir)

and then

folder="c:/temp/" 
os.remove(folder+"New Folder")

because I'm sure "New Folder" is empty. However, in all cases I get:

Traceback (most recent call last): 
  File "<string>", line 3, in <module> 
WindowsError: [Error 5] Access is denied: 'c:/temp/New Folder'

Does anybody know what's going wrong?

windowserror python
11 Answers

For Python 3.6, the file permission mode should be 0o777:

os.chmod(filePath, 0o777)
os.remove(filePath)
user_97479470

os.remove() only works on files. It doesn't work on directories. According to the documentation:

os.remove(path) Remove (delete) the file path. If path is a directory, OSError is raised; see rmdir() below to remove a directory. This is identical to the unlink() function documented below. On Windows, attempting to remove a file that is in use causes an exception to be raised; on Unix, the directory entry is removed but the storage allocated to the file is not made available until the original file is no longer in use.

use os.removedirs() for directories

user_9630420

If you want remove folder, you can use

os.rmdir(path)
user_114231510

Use os.rmdir instead of os.remove to remove a folder

os.rmdir("d:\\test")

It will remove the test folder from d:\\ directory

user_40445930

If it's a directory, then just use:

os.rmdir("path")
user_119455370

The reason you can't delete folders because to delete subfolder in C: drive ,you need admin privileges Either invoke admin privileges in python or do the following hack

Make a simple .bat file with following shell command 

del /q "C:\Temp\*"

FOR /D %%p IN ("C:\temp\*.*") DO rmdir "%%p" /s /q

Save it as file.bat and call this bat file from your python file

Bat file will handle deleting subfolders from C: drive

user_102829080

Can't remove a folder with os.remove

import os

if os.path.exists("demofile.txt"):
  os.remove("demofile.txt")
else:
  print("The file does not exist")
user_60376790
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