How to delete a file in Python
problem
You wish to delete one or more files with Python. In this post we will see how to do that using the os library.
SOLUTION
We import the os library that gives us functions from the Operating System. More specifically, deleting a file is an action the OS performs.
EXAMPLE 1 - SINGLE FILE DELETION
Let’s assume the file to delete is named “test.txt” and it’s in the same directory with the Python program as shown in the screenshot below:
The file is empty (0 bytes) as it’s for demonstration purposes.
Did you know?
On a Unix OS, we can quickly create an empty file by using the touch command in the terminal.
>> touch test.txt
To delete it we will use the os.remove() function and pass the filename as an argument. For example:
import os
filename = "test.txt"
os.remove(filename)
running
python3 delete_file.py
output
File deleted!
EXAMPLE 2 - FILE DOES NOT EXIST
What if the file we specified does not exist or we mistyped its filetitle?
Let’s rerun the code above for the second time; without the file existing. The file has been deleted already, so let’s observe the result.
output
It’s crashing with a FileNotFoundError as shown in the screenshot below:
In order to fix our code and avoid it from crashing we need to add some safe guard code. In this case, error handling.
Instead of directly calling the os.remove() function, we first try to delete it and if it fails then we catch the failing error/ exception.
ADDING TRY-CATCH STATEMENT
import os
filename = "test.txt"
try:
os.remove(filename)
except FileNotFoundError:
print("File not found so it can't be deleted. Check the file exists...")
running
python3 delete_file.py
output
Now, the program instead of crashing, it’s giving us a user-friendly error message.
At the except statement we’re checking for the case the file is not found. Other cases can include PermissionError.
This happens when we try to delete a file and the permission is denied due to user’s permissions.
EXAMPLE 3 - DELETION OF MULTIPLE FILES
What if we want to delete all files in a directory? In this case, we will need to specify the directory instead of a single filename and follow a simple algorithm like the one as follows.
Steps:
- Use the os.listdir() function to list all items in a given directory,
- For each item, use os.path.join() to get its full path by joining the directory’s path and item’s filename
- Then check if the item is a file with os.path.isfile() function and if so, remove it, otherwise do nothing because it’s a directory.
Implementation:
import os
directory_path = "./files_to_delete"
list_dir = os.listdir(directory_path)
for item in list_dir:
item_path = os.path.join(directory_path, item)
if os.path.isfile(item_path):
os.remove(item_path)
The directory I’m using in this example is called “files_to_delete” and has 5 files and 1 directory as shown in the screenshot:
Also in this case the files and the inner directory are empty.
running
python3 delete_file.py
output
No errors on the console.
Let’s check the directory in the screenshot below:
As expected all 5 files in “files_to_delete” got deleted, but the directory no because we checked that each item had to be a file.
If we modify the code above and remove that if statement, both files and folders will be removed.
DELETING FOLDERS INSTEAD OF FILES
With the same logic we can invert the if logic by adding a not and delete only folders and leave files intact.
For example:
if not os.path.isfile(item_path): #check if it's a directory
os.remove(item_path)
Because in the filesystem an item is either a file or a folder (directory).
The os.path.isfile() will return True if the argument we pass is a file and False if it’s not, which means it’s a directory.
conclusion
In this post we saw how to use Python’s built-in library os, to delete files, list items in a directory and check if an item is a file or not. Moreover, we saw how to safeguard our program with try-except mechanism to avoid crashing it in case the file cannot be found.
References:
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Ellion
Professional IT consultant, writer, programmer enthusiast interested in all sorts of coding.
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