Python 3: Delete (Remove) a File

Table of Contents

This article shows how to delete (remove) a single file in Python. To remove an entire directory, see [](/python-remove-directory/).

Using `pathlib` (Python 3.4 and up)

To remove the file /tmp/myfile.txt on Python 3.4 or higher, you can use the built-in pathlib library:

from pathlib import Path

Path( '/tmp/myfile.txt' ).unlink()

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from pathlib import Path

Path( '/tmp/myfile.txt' ).unlink()

This call will raise a FileNotFoundError if /tmp/myfile.txt does not exist.

On Python 3.8 and higher, you can suppress the FileNotFoundError by passing in the missing_ok=True argument:

from pathlib import Path

Path( '/tmp/myfile.txt' ).unlink( missing_ok=True )

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from pathlib import Path

Path( '/tmp/myfile.txt' ).unlink( missing_ok=True )

On Python 3.4 and higher, you can also just check beforehand if the file exists:

from pathlib import Path

myfile = Path( '/tmp/myfile.txt' )
if myfile.exists():
    myfile.unlink()

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from pathlib import Path

myfile = Path( '/tmp/myfile.txt' )
if myfile.exists():
    myfile.unlink()

To remove the file /tmp/myfile.txt on any version of Python 3, you can also use the built-in os library:

import os

os.unlink( '/tmp/myfile.txt' )

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import os

os.unlink( '/tmp/myfile.txt' )

import os

myfile = '/tmp/myfile.txt'
if os.path.exists( myfile ):
    os.unlink( myfile )

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import os

myfile = '/tmp/myfile.txt'
if os.path.exists( myfile ):
    os.unlink( myfile )