python: delete non-empty dir [duplicate]

Question

How do I delete a possibly non-empty dir in Python.

The directory may have nested subdirectories many levels deep.

Answer 1

Use shutil.rmtree:

import shutil  shutil.rmtree(path) 

See the documentation for details of how to handle and/or ignore errors.

Answer 2

The standard library includes shutil.rmtree for this. By default,

shutil.rmtree(path)  # errors if dir not empty 

will give OSError: [Errno 66] Directory not empty: <your/path>.

You can delete the directory and its contents anyway by ignoring the error:

shutil.rmtree(role_fs_path, ignore_errors=True) 

You can perform more sophisticated error handling by also passing onerrror=<some function(function, path, excinfo)>.