Deleting Folders on drive

Question

I am trying to delete a collection of folders on my drive. These directories are not empty. I have come up with a solution as follows:

import shutil
import os

path = "main/"
folderList = ['Blah', 'Blah', 'Blah'];

print ("Cleaning Project at %s" % path)

for c in folderList:
    strippedPath = (path + c).strip("\n")
    print ("Cleaning path " + strippedPath)
    if os.path.exists(strippedPath):
        try:
            shutil.rmtree(strippedPath)
        except OSError as why:
            pass

print ("Done Cleaning Project")

The problem is that without the try / catch I get a error that says

PermissionError: [WinError 5] Access is denied: 'PathToFileHere'

Pressing the delete key on windows will work fine. Can someone provide me a command that will remove this directory without errors?

I'm really stating the obvious here, but it's because Python doesn't have permission from your OS to complete that operation. This isn't something that you can fix from within your code; though there's probably a workaround with something like `subprocess`. — anon582847382, Oct 29 '14 at 17:54
What makes that particular folder so special? It removes the rest? — marsh, Oct 29 '14 at 17:55
possible duplicate of [Python: shutil.rmtree fails on Windows with 'Access is denied'](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2656322/python-shutil-rmtree-fails-on-windows-with-access-is-denied) — Alderven, Oct 29 '14 at 18:29

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 29 '14 at 18:42

First you should avoid to silently swallow an Exception, but at least print or log it. But many thing can happen to a file, they may have Hidden, System or ReadOnly attributes. The current user may not have permissions on files but only on the containing folder. As Python is multi-platform its high-level commands can be less optimized for a particular OS (Windows in your case) than native ones.

You should first try to confirm that in a cmd window, the command rd /s folder correctly remove the folder that shutil.rmtree fails to delete, and if yes ask python so execute it vie the subprocess module :

subprocess.call("rd /s/q " + strippedPath)

Deleting Folders on drive

1 Answers1