Remove all files in a directory

Question

Trying to remove all of the files in a certain directory gives me the follwing error:

OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: \'/home/me/test/*\

Answer 1

Bit of a hack but if you would like to keep the directory, the following can be used.

import os
import shutil
shutil.rmtree('/home/me/test') 
os.mkdir('/home/me/test')

Answer 2

#python 2.7
import tempfile
import shutil
import exceptions
import os

def TempCleaner():
    temp_dir_name = tempfile.gettempdir()
    for currentdir in os.listdir(temp_dir_name):
        try:
           shutil.rmtree(os.path.join(temp_dir_name, currentdir))
        except exceptions.WindowsError, e:
            print u'Не удалось удалить:'+ e.filename

Answer 3

star is expanded by Unix shell. Your call is not accessing shell, it's merely trying to remove a file with the name ending with the star

Answer 4

Another way I've done this:

os.popen('rm -f ./yourdir')

Answer 5

shutil.rmtree() for most cases. But it doesn't work for in Windows for readonly files. For windows import win32api and win32con modules from PyWin32.

def rmtree(dirname):
    retry = True
    while retry:
        retry = False
        try:
            shutil.rmtree(dirname)
        except exceptions.WindowsError, e:
            if e.winerror == 5: # No write permission
                win32api.SetFileAttributes(dirname, win32con.FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL)
                retry = True

Answer 6

Please see my answer here:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/24844618/2293304

It's a long and ugly, but reliable and efficient solution.

It resolves a few problems which are not addressed by the other answerers:

• It correctly handles symbolic links, including not calling shutil.rmtree() on a symbolic link (which will pass the os.path.isdir() test if it links to a directory).
• It handles read-only files nicely.