Deleting directory in Python

Question

shutil.rmtree will not delete read-only files on Windows. Is there a python equivalent of "rm -rf" ? Why oh why is this such a pain?

Answer 1

shutil.rmtree can take an error-handling function that will be called when it has problem removing a file. You can use that to force the removal of the problematic file(s).

Inspired by http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/2006-June/047551.html and http://techarttiki.blogspot.com/2008/08/read-only-windows-files-with-python.html:

import os
import stat
import shutil

def remove_readonly(func, path, excinfo):
    os.chmod(path, stat.S_IWRITE)
    func(path)

shutil.rmtree(top, onerror=remove_readonly)

(I haven't tested that snippet out, but it should be enough to get you started)

Answer 2

If you import win32api from PyWin32, you can use:

win32api.SetFileAttributes(path, win32con.FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL)

To make files cease to be read-only.

Answer 3

Another way is to define rmtree on Windows as

rmtree = lambda path: subprocess.check_call(['cmd', '/c', 'rd', '/s', '/q', path])

Answer 4

There's a comment at the ActiveState site that says:

shutil.rmtree has its shortcomings. Although it is true you can use shutil.rmtree() in many cases, there are some cases where it does not work. For example, files that are marked read-only under Windows cannot be deleted by shutil.rmtree().

By importing the win32api and win32con modules from PyWin32 and adding line like "win32api.SetFileAttributes(path, win32con.FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL" to the rmgeneric() function, this obstacle can be overcome. I used this approach to fix the hot-backup.py script of Subversion 1.4 so it will work under Windows. Thank you for the recipe.

I don't use Windows so can't verify whether this works or not.

Answer 5

Here is a variant of what Steve posted, it uses the same basic mechanism, and this one is tested :-)

What user do python scripts run as in windows?

Answer 6

This will presumably be fixed with the release of Python 3.5 (currently - June 2015 - still in development) in the sense of giving a hint about this in the documentation.

You can find the bugreport here. And this is the according changeset.

See the newly added example from the Python 3.5 docs:

import os, stat
import shutil

def remove_readonly(func, path, _):
    "Clear the readonly bit and reattempt the removal"
    os.chmod(path, stat.S_IWRITE)
    func(path)

shutil.rmtree(directory, onerror=remove_readonly)