Delete all files in directory python

In order to delete all the files in a folder with Python, but keep the folder itself, we can loop over each file in that folder and delete it using the method we described above. What the glob library helps us do is get the paths to all files in a directory. Because of this, you may need to install it. This can be done by using either pip or conda in the terminal, such as below:.

When working with different files in your operating system, you may want to delete files conditionally. For example, you may want to use Python to delete all files with a certain word in the filename or files that have a certain filetype. For this, we can use the glob library to find all files in a folder, especially using a condition.

To learn more about the glob library and how to use it to find all files in a directory using Python, you can check out my in-depth tutorial here. This approach is quite helpful to handle errors. Want to learn more about Python for-loops? Check out my in-depth tutorial that takes your from beginner to advanced for-loops user! Want to watch a video instead?

Check out my YouTube tutorial here. The pathlib library uses an object-oriented approach to handling files and file paths. Because of this, we can use the library to access attributes of Path objects or apply methods onto the objects. One of these methods is the. You may notice that we passed in an argument into the. This is similar to using the os library to first check if the file exists, but it does save us one line of code.

Need to automate renaming files? Check out this in-depth guide on using pathlib to rename files. More of a visual learner, the entire tutorial is also available as a video in the post! Interestingly, both the os and pathlib libraries do not have functions or methods that allow you to delete non-empty directories. Because of this, we need to first delete all files in a directory to be able to delete the directory itself. If we try to delete a directory that has files in it, Python will throw an Directory not empty error.

Keep in mind, that if the folder contains another folder, then this code will fail. In those cases, read on to see how to use the shutil library to delete a folder that contains files and other folders. Want to learn more about Python list comprehensions?

Check out this in-depth tutorial that covers off everything you need to know, with hands-on examples. More of a visual learner, check out my YouTube tutorial here. You can also iterate over files in a directory using the glob. However, this also raises an exception if the root directory has any subdirectories.

With Python version 3. Like all other approaches, this fails when the root directory contains subdirectories. If you need to delete all files, subdirectories, and symbolic links from a directory, consider using the shutil. If you need to delete the complete directory, you can directly call the shutil.

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