Python delete directory

With Python, you can automate operations on files and directories. This notebook shows how to use the Python built-in module shutil. It has rmtree() function that can be used to remove directories.

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Documentation

The shutil.rmtree() can remove empty directory and directory with files. We run it in try ... except block because it may raise Exception if directory doesn't exist or for other reasons (missing rights to delete).

We will use documents directory in this notebook:

documents/
├── music
│   ├── bass-guitar-sample.mp3
│   ├── first-song.mp3
│   ├── italo-disco.mp3
│   └── rave.wav
├── my-cv.pdf
├── phd-thesis.txt
├── todo.txt
└── video
    ├── holidays-2023.mp4
    ├── holidays-2024.mp4
    └── zoo.mov

Let's remove documents/music directory.

# import packages
import shutil
# try to delete directory
try:
    shutil.rmtree(r"/home/piotr/documents/music")
except Exception as e:
    print(f"Error during directory delete, {str(e)}")

Let's check documents directory after running above code:

documents/
├── my-cv.pdf
├── phd-thesis.txt
├── todo.txt
└── video
    ├── holidays-2023.mp4
    ├── holidays-2024.mp4
    └── zoo.mov

1 directory, 6 files

You can see that the the music directory and all files in it are deleted. Please be careful when using shutil.rmtree() because you can quickly remove all your directories. Take care!

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