How to delete a folder with files using Java

Question

I want to create and delete a directory using Java, but it isn\'t working.

File index = new File(\"/home/Work/Indexer1\");
if (!index.exists()) {
    index.m         


        

Answer 1

One more choice is to use Spring's org.springframework.util.FileSystemUtils relevant method which will recursively delete all content of the directory.

File directoryToDelete = new File(<your_directory_path_to_delete>);
FileSystemUtils.deleteRecursively(directoryToDelete);

That will do the job!

Answer 2

you can try as follows

  File dir = new File("path");
   if (dir.isDirectory())
   {
         dir.delete();
   }

If there are sub folders inside your folder you may need to recursively delete them.

Answer 3

Most of answers (even recent) referencing JDK classes rely on File.delete() but that is a flawed API as the operation may fail silently.
The java.io.File.delete() method documentation states :

Note that the java.nio.file.Files class defines the delete method to throw an IOException when a file cannot be deleted. This is useful for error reporting and to diagnose why a file cannot be deleted.

As replacement, you should favor Files.delete(Path p) that throws an IOException with a error message.

The actual code could be written such as :

Path index = Paths.get("/home/Work/Indexer1");

if (!Files.exists(index)) {
    index = Files.createDirectories(index);
} else {

    Files.walk(index)
         .sorted(Comparator.reverseOrder())  // as the file tree is traversed depth-first and that deleted dirs have to be empty  
         .forEach(t -> {
             try {
                 Files.delete(t);
             } catch (IOException e) {
                 // LOG the exception and potentially stop the processing

             }
         });
    if (!Files.exists(index)) {
        index = Files.createDirectories(index);
    }
}

Answer 4

This works, and while it looks inefficient to skip the directory test, it's not: the test happens right away in listFiles().

void deleteDir(File file) {
    File[] contents = file.listFiles();
    if (contents != null) {
        for (File f : contents) {
            deleteDir(f);
        }
    }
    file.delete();
}

Update, to avoid following symbolic links:

void deleteDir(File file) {
    File[] contents = file.listFiles();
    if (contents != null) {
        for (File f : contents) {
            if (! Files.isSymbolicLink(f.toPath())) {
                deleteDir(f);
            }
        }
    }
    file.delete();
}

Answer 5

private void deleteFileOrFolder(File file){
    try {
        for (File f : file.listFiles()) {
            f.delete();
            deleteFileOrFolder(f);
        }
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace(System.err);
    }
}

Answer 6

You can use this function

public void delete()    
{   
    File f = new File("E://implementation1/");
    File[] files = f.listFiles();
    for (File file : files) {
        file.delete();
    }
}