Deleting files of specific extension using * in Python

user_12116796 0
Viewed 3252

I have couple of text files named as:

temp1.txt
temp2.txt
temp3.txt
temp4.txt
track.txt

I want to delete files only starting with temp and ending with .txt. I tried using os.remove("temp*.txt") but I'm getting error as:

The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect: 'temp*.txt'

What is the right way to do this using python 3.7?

delete-file file python
4 Answers
from pathlib import Path

for filename in Path(".").glob("temp*.txt"):
    filename.unlink()
user_97507060

For your question, you can take a look at the methods of built-in function str. Just check what the filename starts and ends with like:

>>> name = "temp1.txt"
>>> name.startswith("temp") and name.endswith("txt")
True

Then you can use a for loop with os.remove():

for name in files_list:
    if name.startswith("temp") and name.endswith("txt"):
        os.remove(name)

Use os.listdir() or str.split() to create the list.

user_137034760

This pattern matching can be done by using glob module. And pathlib is one more alterantive if you don't want to use os.path module

import os 
import glob
path = os.path.join("/home", "mint", "Desktop", "test1") # If you want to manually specify path
print(os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__)))   # To get the path of current directory 
print(os.listdir(path)) # To verify the list of files present in the directory 
required_files = glob.glob(path+"/temp*.txt") # This gives all the files that matches the pattern
print("required_files are ", required_files)
results = [os.remove(x) for x in required_files]
print(results)
user_117397170 
import glob


# get a recursive list of file paths that matches pattern  
fileList = glob.glob('temp*.txt', recursive=True)    
# iterate over the list of filepaths & remove each file. 

for filePath in fileList:
    try:
        os.remove(filePath)
    except OSError:
        print("Error while deleting file")
user_11449290
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