David Y.
—How do I delete a file or folder in Python?
We can use functions from Python’s built-in os
module to delete files and empty folders.
os.remove()
will delete a file.os.rmdir()
will delete an empty folder.To delete a folder that is not empty, we must use the rmtree()
function from Python’s shutil
module.
For example:
import os, shutil os.remove("unwanted-file.txt") os.rmdir("empty-dir") shutil.rmtree("nonempty-dir")
Note that these functions will throw errors if the file or directory to be deleted does not exist. We can avoid this by using os.path.isfile()
and os.path.isdir()
to test for their existence before attempting the deletion:
import os, shutil if os.path.isfile("unwanted-file.txt"): os.remove("unwanted-file.txt") if os.path.isdir("empty-dir"): os.rmdir("empty-dir") if os.path.isdir("nonempty-dir"): shutil.rmtree("nonempty-dir")
If you’re looking to get a deeper understanding of how Python application monitoring works, take a look at the following articles:
Tasty treats for web developers brought to you by Sentry. Get tips and tricks from Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski.
SEE EPISODESConsidered “not bad” by 4 million developers and more than 100,000 organizations worldwide, Sentry provides code-level observability to many of the world’s best-known companies like Disney, Peloton, Cloudflare, Eventbrite, Slack, Supercell, and Rockstar Games. Each month we process billions of exceptions from the most popular products on the internet.