shutil.rmtree to remove readonly files

Question

I want to use shutil.rmtree in Python to remove a directory. The directory in question contains a .git control directory, which git marks as read-only and hidden.

The read-only flag causes rmtree to fail. In Powershell, I would do "del -force" to force removal of the read-only flag. Is there an equivalent in Python? I'd really rather not walk the whole tree twice, but the onerror argument to rmtree doesn't seem to retry the operation, so I can't use

def set_rw(operation, name, exc):
    os.chmod(name, stat.S_IWRITE)

shutil.rmtree('path', onerror=set_rw)

Answer 1

After more investigation, the following appears to work:

def del_rw(action, name, exc):
    os.chmod(name, stat.S_IWRITE)
    os.remove(name)
shutil.rmtree(path, onerror=del_rw)

In other words, actually remove the file in the onerror function. (You might need to check for a directory in the onerror handler and use rmdir in that case - I didn't need that but it may just be something specific about my problem.

Answer 2

shutil.rmtree is used to delete directories that are not empty (remove tree).

    import os
    import stat
    import shutil
    def del_ro_dir(dir_name):
        '''Remove Read Only Directories'''
        for (root, dirs, files) in os.walk(dir_name, topdown=True):
            os.chmod(root,
                # For user ...
                stat.S_IRUSR |
                stat.S_IWUSR |
                stat.S_IXUSR |
                # For group ...
                stat.S_IWGRP |
                stat.S_IRGRP |
                stat.S_IXGRP |
                # For other ...
                stat.S_IROTH |
                stat.S_IWOTH |
                stat.S_IXOTH
            )
        shutil.rmtree(dir_name)

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        del_ro_dir('dir_name_here')

To delete a file only, you can use the following code:

    import os
    import stat
    def rmv_rof(file_name):
        '''Remov Read Only Files'''
        if os.path.exists(file_name):
            os.chmod(file_name, stat.S_IWRITE)
            os.remove(file_name)
        else:
            print('The file does not exist.')
    rmv_rof('file_name_here')

You can read detailed information here:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.html#os.chmod

https://docs.python.org/3/library/stat.html#module-stat

https://docs.python.org/3/library/shutil.html#rmtree-example

Answer 3

You could just go with the quick-and-dirty method and do subprocess.check_call(["rm", "-rf", filename]). Likely won't work on Windows though.