How to remove or Delete a File or Folder in Python

Scripting has always been a flagship feature that Python has provided to its users.

Keeping this premium feature of Python in mind, in this article , we will discuss about how to delete a file or folder from a directory / sub directory using Python.

Method 1: Using os.remove() #

The os module of python gives us full immunity to interact with the operating system and play around with the files and folders in our machine.

But the os methods also raise an OSError in case of an invalid file path or corrupted file path etc.

We can use the os.remove() method delete a file from our system.

The remove method takes in two parameters, while one of them is optional.

The two parameters are:

1. Path : File Path
2. dirDesc (optional) : A file description regarding your directory / sub directory.

The remove() method can be invoked by, os.remove(Path, dirDec).

import os     
dirName = "Test"
fileName ="file1.txt"

location = "E:\SampleFolder"


filePath = os.path.join(location, fileName)

dirPath = os.path.join(location, dirName)

os.remove(filePath)  
print("File Succesfully Removed")

os.remove(dirPath) 
print("Directory Succesfully Removed !")

"""

Output:
File Succesfully Removed

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
PermissionError: [WinError 5] Access is denied: 'E:\\SampleFolder\\Test'

"""

If the specified path is a directory, then the OSError is raised.

Thus, we can conclude that this method can’t be used for removing or deleting a directory.

But this is not a healthy approach as a good programmer.

So, being a responsible coder, we should handle all the possible errors and show some error message instead.

Let’s try to handle the OSError generated while trying to remove a directory.

import os 
    
dirName = "Test"
location = "E:\SampleFolder"

dirPath = os.path.join(location, dirName)
try: 
    os.remove(dirPath) 
    print(" File removed successfully") 
except OSError as error: 
    print(error) 
    print("File cannot be removed")

"""
Output:

[WinError 5] Access is denied: 'E:\\SampleFolder\\Test'
File cannot be removed
"""    

Method 2: Using os.unlink() #

If you are working in UNIX operating system, then use os.unlink() method to delete a file in Python.

It’s pretty much same as os.remove() method, except the it’s specific to UNIX os.

import os     
dirName = "Test"
fileName ="file1.txt"

location = "E:\SampleFolder"


filePath = os.path.join(location, fileName)

os.unlink(filePath)  
print("File Succesfully Removed")

Method 3: Using os.rmdir() #

We were unable to delete directories using the remove() method that doesn’t imply that we can never remove directories ?

No, we can. It’s Python and thus we always have a scope of achieving our desired result.

We can use the rmdir() method from the os module to remove the empty directories from our machine.

But this method can only remove the empty directories and will raise an OSError if the specified path is not not an empty directory.

Not specifically what we wanted but pretty similar.

Removing empty directories are also sometimes an important use case.

import os 
    
dirName = "Test"
emptyDirName = "TestClean"

location = "E:\SampleFolder"
dirPath = os.path.join(location, dirName)
emptyDirPath = os.path.join(location,emptyDirName)

os.rmdir(emptyDirPath)
print("Directory Removed")

os.rmdir(dirPath)
print("Dir Removed Successfully")

"""
Output:

Directory Removed

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
OSError: [WinError 145] The directory is not empty: 'E:\\SampleFolder\\Test'
"""

As mentioned above, we get an OSError whenever we try to remove a non-empty directory.

Again since, we have an error , our responsibility is to handle that user and show a nice error message for the user.

import os 
    
dirName = "Test"
emptyDirName = "TestClean"

location = "E:\SampleFolder"
dirPath = os.path.join(location, dirName)

try:     
    os.rmdir(dirPath) 
    print(" File removed successfully") 
except OSError as error: 
    print(error) 
    print("File cannot be removed")

"""
Output:

[WinError 145] The directory is not empty: 'E:\\SampleFolder\\Test'
File cannot be removed
"""    

We will discuss about how to remove an entire directory from the machine.

Method 4: Using shutil.rmtree() #

Well, apart from os module, we can also use the shutil module in order to delete a complete directory from our system.

The shutil.rmtree() method takes in three parameters with two being optional.

1. path: File Path
2. ignore_errors: If true, errors due to failure are ignored.
3. onerror: if ignore_errors is false, then we can handle error using onerror

Let’s try this method and tru to remove the directory:

import shutil
import os 
    
dirName = "Test"
location = "E:\SampleFolder"

dirPath = os.path.join(location, dirName)
  
shutil.rmtree(dirPath)
print("Directory Removed !")

"""
Output:
Directory Removed !
"""

Using ignore_errors parameter #

This parameter bypasses all the weird error messages that are generated if a file is not present.

import shutil
import os 
    
dirName = "Test"

location = "E:\SampleFolder"
  
dirPath = os.path.join(location, dirName)

shutil.rmtree(dirPath, ignore_errors = True)
print("File Removed ?")

"""
Output:
File Removed ?

"""

Using the onerror parameter #

The onerror must be assigned with a function having three parameter.

1. function – function which raised the exception.
2. path – File path that caused the exception
3. excinfo – exception info raised by sys.exc_info()

import shutil
import os 
    
dirName = "Test"

location = "E:\SampleFolder"
  
dirPath = os.path.join(location, dirName)
  
def Errorhandler(func, path, exc_info):
    print("Oops ! Something went Wrong")
    print(exc_info)
  
shutil.rmtree(dirPath, onerror = Errorhandler)

"""
Output:

Oops ! Something went Wrong
(<class 'FileNotFoundError'>, FileNotFoundError(2, 'The system cannot find the path specified'), <traceback object at 0x000001B4A669DE00>)
Oops ! Something went Wrong
(<class 'FileNotFoundError'>, FileNotFoundError(2, 'The system cannot find the file specified'), <traceback object at 0x000001B4A669DE00>)

"""

Method 5: Using pathlib module #

Path object from the Python 3.4+ pathlib module, contains two methods which can be used to delete a file or folder in Python.

1. pathlib.Path.unlink()
2. pathlib.Path.rmdir() :

Using pathlib.Path.unlink() method #

Removes a file or symbolic link in Python

import pathlib


fileName ="file1.txt"

location = "E:\SampleFolder"


filePath = os.path.join(location, fileName)

file = pathlib.Path(filePath)

# Call the unlink method
file.unlink()

Using pathlib.Path.rmdir() method #

Removes an empty directory in Python

import pathlib

# Deleting an empty folder

empty_folder = "E:\emptyFolder"
path = pathlib.Path(empty_folder)
path.rmdir()

Conclusion #

In this tutorial, we discussed about the different methods to delete files and folders using Python.

First, we looked up on the different methods from the os module by which we were able to delete files and empty directories.

Towards the end, we discussed about the method from shutil module by which we could delete a complete directory.

And in the latest versions of Python we can use pathlib module.

I am Dibyanshu Mohanty, Undergraduate Engineering Student at VIT, Vellore with a keen interest in Web and App Development

https://python.shiksha/authors/dmohanty/