from the desk of stinkpot

recursively remove directories in python

April 2nd, 2007 by Lawrence David

if you try and use os.rmdir to remove a set of nested directories in python, you’ll receive the following error message:

OSError: [Errno 66] Directory not empty:

to skirt this problem, use the shutil module:

import shutil

shutil.rmtree(tree_name)

Posted in Python | 2 Comments »

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2 Responses to “recursively remove directories in python”

1. on 11 Dec 2009 at 1:24 pm   kevin cline

   This fails if any files are read-only.

2. on 06 Aug 2012 at 5:04 am   GF

   Extremely simple bit of code to remove a directory recursively. Simply feed it the path of the top-level directory to remove, and off it goes. As presented, there is no error-checking; failure at any point will stop the function and raise an IOError.

   import os
   def rm_rf(d):
   for path in (os.path.join(d,f) for f in os.listdir(d)):
   if os.path.isdir(path):
   rm_rf(path)
   else:
   os.unlink(path)
   os.rmdir(d)