Can't remove a folder with os.remove (WindowsError: [Error 5] Access is denied: 'c:/temp/New Folder')

Question

I'm working on a test case for which I create some subdirs. However, I don't seem to have the permission to remove them anymore. My UA is an Administrator account (Windows XP).

I first tried:

folder="c:/temp/"  for dir in os.listdir(folder):      os.remove(folder+dir) 

and then

folder="c:/temp/"  os.remove(folder+"New Folder") 

because I'm sure "New Folder" is empty. However, in all cases I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):    File "<string>", line 3, in <module>  WindowsError: [Error 5] Access is denied: 'c:/temp/New Folder' 

Does anybody know what's going wrong?

Answer 1

os.remove requires a file path, and raises OSError if path is a directory.

Try os.rmdir(folder+'New Folder')

Which will:

Remove (delete) the directory path. Only works when the directory is empty, otherwise, OSError is raised.

Making paths is also safer using os.path.join:

os.path.join("c:\\", "temp", "new folder") 

Answer 2

try the inbuilt shutil module

shutil.rmtree(folder+"New Folder") 

this recursively deletes a directory, even if it has contents.