Remove all files in a directory

Question

os.remove() does not work on a directory, and os.rmdir() will only work on an empty directory. And Python won't automatically expand "/home/me/test/*" like some shells do.

You can use shutil.rmtree() on the directory to do this, however.

import shutil
shutil.rmtree('/home/me/test') 

be careful as it removes the files and the sub-directories as well.

os.remove doesn't resolve unix-style patterns. If you are on a unix-like system you can:

os.system('rm '+test)

Else you can:

import glob, os
test = '/path/*'
r = glob.glob(test)
for i in r:
   os.remove(i)

Bit of a hack but if you would like to keep the directory, the following can be used.

import os
import shutil
shutil.rmtree('/home/me/test') 
os.mkdir('/home/me/test')

Because the * is a shell construct. Python is literally looking for a file named "*" in the directory /home/me/test. Use listdir to get a list of the files first and then call remove on each one.

Although this is an old question, I think none has already answered using this approach:

# python 2.7
import os

d='/home/me/test'
filesToRemove = [os.path.join(d,f) for f in os.listdir(d)]
for f in filesToRemove:
    os.remove(f) 

This will get all files in a directory and remove them.

import os

BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
dir = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "foldername")

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(dir):
  for file in files:
    path = os.path.join(dir, file)
    os.remove(path)

star is expanded by Unix shell. Your call is not accessing shell, it's merely trying to remove a file with the name ending with the star