Force Overwrite in Os.Rename

Question

Is it possible to force a rename os.rename to overwrite another file if it already exists? For example in the code below if the file Tests.csv already exists it would be replaced by the Tests.txt file (that was also renamed to Tests.csv).

os.rename("C:\Users\Test.txt","C:\Users\Tests.csv"); 

Answer 1

Since Python 3.3, there is now a standard cross-platform solution, os.replace:

Rename the file or directory src to dst. If dst is a directory, OSError will be raised. If dst exists and is a file, it will be replaced silently if the user has permission. The operation may fail if src and dst are on different filesystems. If successful, the renaming will be an atomic operation (this is a POSIX requirement).

Availability: Unix, Windows.

New in version 3.3.

However, contrary to the documentation, on Windows it's not guaranteed to be atomic (in Python 3.4.4). That's because internally it uses MoveFileEx on Windows, which doesn't make such a guarantee.

Answer 2

You could try shutil.move():

from shutil import move  move('C:\\Users\\Test.txt', 'C:\\Users\\Tests.csv') 

Or os.remove and then shutil.move:

from os import remove from shutil import move  remove('C:\\Users\\Tests.csv') move('C:\\Users\\Test.txt', 'C:\\Users\\Tests.csv')