How to Delete a File or Folder in Python

How do I delete a file or folder in Python?

• os.remove() removes a file.

• os.rmdir() removes an empty directory.

• shutil.rmtree() deletes a directory and all its contents.

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Path objects from the Python 3.4+ pathlib module also expose these instance methods:

• pathlib.Path.unlink() removes a file or symbolic link.

• pathlib.Path.rmdir() removes an empty directory.

How to delete the contents of a folder?

import os, shutil
folder = '/path/to/folder'
for filename in os.listdir(folder):
    file_path = os.path.join(folder, filename)
    try:
        if os.path.isfile(file_path) or os.path.islink(file_path):
            os.unlink(file_path)
        elif os.path.isdir(file_path):
            shutil.rmtree(file_path)
    except Exception as e:
        print('Failed to delete %s. Reason: %s' % (file_path, e))

How to permanently delete a file in python 3 and higher?

os.remove is already what you're looking for. It doesn't send things to Trash. It just deletes them.

How do I delete a specified number of files in a directory in Python?

You simply have to iterate correctly in the range:

files = os.listdir('path/to/your/folder')
for file in files[:11]:
    os.remove(file)

in this way you are iterating through a list containing the first 11 files.

If you want to remove random files, you can use:

from random import sample

files = os.listdir('path/to/your/folder')
for file in sample(files,11):
    os.remove(file)

For folder in dir, enter it and delete files if condition is met

You should spend time to make this function more efficient. However, it will do what you want.

import os

def deleteNonPyFiles(parent_dir):
    no_delete_kw = '.py'
    for (dirpath, dirnames, filenames) in os.walk(parent_dir):
        for file in filenames:
            if no_delete_kw not in file:
                os.remove(f'{dirpath}/{file}')
   
deleteNonPyFiles('C:/User/mydirpath')

Python remove files from folder which are not in list

for filename in os.listdir(path):
    print(filename)
    if filename not in file_name:
        os.remove(filename)

Deleting files of specific extension using * in Python

from pathlib import Path

for filename in Path(".").glob("temp*.txt"):
    filename.unlink()

How delete all files in a folder except last 5 items with Python

User os.listdir to get the name of the files. As this returns an iterator you can easily sort the way you want in python itself. then use list indexing to keep the last five ones.

then use os.remove to remove the files

import os
for filename in sorted(os.listdir("foldername"))[:-5]:
    filename_relPath = os.path.join("foldername",filename)
    os.remove(filename_relPath)

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