How to Delete Files and Directories Using Python

1. Delete Files Using os Module in Python
2. Delete Files Using pathlib Module in Python
3. Delete Files With Pattern Matching in Python
4. Delete Directories Using Python os Module
5. Delete Directories Using Python pathlib Module
6. Delete Non-Empty Directories Using Python shutil.rmtree Method

This article introduces how to delete files and directories with Python built-in packages such as os, pathlib and shutil.

Delete Files Using os Module in Python

os is an inbuilt package available in both Python 2 and Python 3.

We can use remove() and unlink() from os module to delete files using Python. Both of these functions are similar in action. Both of them take the path of the file to be deleted as an argument.

import os

os.remove("test_dir/main.py")

It deletes the file named main.py located inside test_dir. As we are using the relative path here, test_dir must be in the same root folder as that of our Python program. We can also use the absolute file path.

import os

os.unlink("test_dir/main.py")

It also deletes the file named main.py located inside test_dir.

Both functions can only delete files. If we give the path of the directory to delete, we get the IsADirectoryError error.

Similarly, we get FileNotFoundError if the file is not present in the specified path.

If we do not have permission to delete the file, we get the PermissionError error.

To tackle these errors while deleting the file, we should use the exception handling.

import os

try:
    os.remove("test_dir/main.py")
except OSError as e:
    print(f"Error:{ e.strerror}")

Output:

Error:No such file or directory

If there is no such file, we get error printed in output rather than the whole program to be crashed.

Delete Files Using pathlib Module in Python

To remove files using the pathlib module, we at first create a Path object defined in the pathlib module. Then we use the unlink() method to delete the file.

from pathlib import Path

filePath = Path("test_dir/main.py")

try:
    filePath.unlink()
except OSError as e:
    print(f"Error:{ e.strerror}")

Here, we instantiate the filePath object from the Path class with the location of the file to be deleted.

pathlib module is only available in Python 3.4 and above. For Python 2 we need to install the module using pip.

Delete Files With Pattern Matching in Python

We can use the glob module to match patterns in files and after collecting all the files that match the pattern, we can delete all of them using any of the methods specified above.

import os
import glob

py_files = glob.glob("test_dir/*.py")

for py_file in py_files:
    try:
        os.remove(py_file)
    except OSError as e:
        print(f"Error:{ e.strerror}")

This deletes all the files in the test_dir directory with extension .py.

Delete Directories Using Python os Module

To delte the directories using Python, we can use os, pathlib and shutlib directory. os and pathlib can only delete empty directories while shutlib can remove non-empty directories too.

import os

dirPath = "test_dir"

try:
    os.rmdir(dirPath)
except OSError as e:
    print(f"Error:{ e.strerror}")

It deletes the empty directory test_dir in our current working directory.

Delete Directories Using Python pathlib Module

If the directory is non-empty the directory cannot be removed using this method, we get an output from the program saying Error: Directory not empty.

We can also use the pathlib module to remove non-empty directories.

from pathlib import Path

dirPath = Path("test_dir")

try:
    dirPath.rmdir()
except OSError as e:
    print(f"Error:{ e.strerror}")

It also deletes the empty directory test_dir in our current working directory.

Delete Non-Empty Directories Using Python shutil.rmtree Method

To delete non-empty directories using Python , we use the rmtree method from the shutil module.

import shutil

dirPath = "test_dir"

try:
    shutil.rmtree(dirPath)
except OSError as e:
    print(f"Error:{ e.strerror}")

It deletes the directory test_dir in our current working directory and all of its contents.