Python 3: Remove Directory Recursively (Like rm -r)

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On the Linux command line, if you want to remove (delete) a directory and all of its contents (including subdirectories), you can use the "recursive" (-r) option of the rm command. For example, to remove directory /tmp/mydir and all of its contents, you would run: rm -r /tmp/mydir.

Here is the Python 3 equivalent of that command:

import shutil

shutil.rmtree( '/tmp/mydir' )

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import shutil

shutil.rmtree( '/tmp/mydir' )

If you're using pathlib on Python 3.4 and up, you can also use shutil.rmtree with pathlib.Paths as well. The pathlib library does not have its own recursive directory removal function (pathlib rmdir only removes empty directories), so this is the way to delete a directory and all of its contents with a pathlib.Path:

import pathlib
import shutil

mydir = pathlib.Path( '/tmp/mydir' )
shutil.rmtree( mydir )

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import pathlib
import shutil

mydir = pathlib.Path( '/tmp/mydir' )
shutil.rmtree( mydir )

• "shutil.rmtree" in "shutil — High-level file operations — Python 3 documentation"

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