C++ Delete all files and subfolders but keep the directory itself

Question

I need to delete everything in my temporary folder. I know I can use filesystem::remove_all and filesystem::remove_all_dir but that would mean the program will also delete the temp folder itself which is not what I want of course. I couldn't find an answer for this that was C++ so if you guys could help, that'd be nice.

Thanks!

Use a `directory_iterator` and delete the contents yourself (call `remove_all` on each member of the folder), or delete the whole thing and then recreate the folder. — Jonathan Potter, Nov 27 '19 at 20:09

score 16 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 20 '23 at 19:10

16

std::filesystem::remove_all( path ) will recursively delete a folder at path and it will delete the file if path refers to a file not a directory.

so

void deleteDirectoryContents(const std::filesystem::path& dir)
{
    for (const auto& entry : std::filesystem::directory_iterator(dir)) 
        std::filesystem::remove_all(entry.path());
}

edited Jul 20 '23 at 19:10

Jeffrey Faust

547
3
12

answered Nov 27 '19 at 21:38

jwezorek

8,592
1
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46

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 27 '19 at 21:32

If you can use std::filesystem, the solution could be following:

#include <filesystem>

namespace fs = std::filesystem;

void delete_dir_content(const fs::path& dir_path) {
    for (auto& path: fs::directory_iterator(dir_path)) {
        fs::remove_all(path);
    }
}

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 20 '22 at 12:51

I know the topic is labeled for Windows, but I found it when I was looking for the solution for Unix. So here is the solution for Unix running C++ 11 with the sandard libraries. It's based on this anwser:

#include <dirent.h>

bool cleanDirectory(const std::string &path){
    struct dirent *ent;
    DIR *dir = opendir(path.c_str());
    if (dir != NULL) {
        /* remove all the files and directories within directory */
        while ((ent = readdir(dir)) != NULL) {
            std::remove((path + ent->d_name).c_str());
        }
        closedir (dir);
    } else {
        /* could not open directory */
        return false;
    }
    return true;
}

C++ Delete all files and subfolders but keep the directory itself

3 Answers3