How to delete files in python

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In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to do the following in python

• Deleting files in python
• Checking if files still exist
• Deleting folders in python

Deleting files in python

To delete a file in python, we can use the remove() which is called from the os module. This remove() method takes only one arguments.

syntax

os.remove(file_name)

Let’s demonstrate with an example

import os
# Delete file2.txt
os.remove(“file2.txt”)

After you must have deleted a file and you want to confirm if the file has been deleted or you might to check if the file still exist before deleting. Here is an example to check if a file has been deleted or still exist

import os
if os.path.exists("file2.txt"):
  os.remove("file2.txt")
else:
  print("The file does not exist")

Deleting folders in python

The method used in deleting folders in python is not that different from the method used when deleting files. When deleting folders we use the os.rmdir() method. Let’s illustrate with an example by deleting a folder called movies

import os
os.rmdir("movies")

Deleting python files with directories

We can remove a directory containing python with a method shutil.rmtree() which is located in the shutil library. With this method, we can clear off an entire directory file. Below is the syntax for the shutil method:

syntax

import shutil
shutil.rmtree(file_path)

Just like the os.remove(), we have imported shutil.rmtree() since an it’s part of an external library.

Let’s illustrate with an example on how to use this method. Let’s remove the final directory which is part of our grade analysis program. To remove the directory we use the following codes

import shutil
path = "/home/school/math/final"
shutil.rmtree(path)
print("/home/school/math/final has been removed.")

Python Os Error Handling

In some cases when we want to delete a file, the arguments can returned a permission error. There are times when we encounter error problems when using the three methods mention abovet. There is a way to handle these errors in case they arises, we can do this using the try except block. In the example below the compiler executes the lines of code within the try block and if an error is encountered, it will then run the within except block (if the OS Error is raised).

import os
path = "/home/school/math/final"
try:
	os.rmdir(path)
	print("/home/school/math/final has been deleted.")
except OSError as error:
	print("There was an error.")

CONCLUSION

One of the common things we do in python is to remove files. We use the os.remove() to delete specific files, the os.rmdir() method can be used to remove an empty directory and the shutil.rmtree() method to delete a folder that contains one or more files.

Thank for reading guys. Happy coding