shutil.rmtree fails on Windows with 'Access is denied' [duplicate]

Question

In Python, when running shutil.rmtree over a folder that contains a read-only file, the following exception is printed:

 File "C:\Python26\lib\shutil.py", line 216, in rmtree    rmtree(fullname, ignore_errors, onerror)  File "C:\Python26\lib\shutil.py", line 216, in rmtree    rmtree(fullname, ignore_errors, onerror)  File "C:\Python26\lib\shutil.py", line 216, in rmtree    rmtree(fullname, ignore_errors, onerror)  File "C:\Python26\lib\shutil.py", line 216, in rmtree    rmtree(fullname, ignore_errors, onerror)  File "C:\Python26\lib\shutil.py", line 216, in rmtree    rmtree(fullname, ignore_errors, onerror)  File "C:\Python26\lib\shutil.py", line 216, in rmtree    rmtree(fullname, ignore_errors, onerror)  File "C:\Python26\lib\shutil.py", line 216, in rmtree    rmtree(fullname, ignore_errors, onerror)  File "C:\Python26\lib\shutil.py", line 221, in rmtree    onerror(os.remove, fullname, sys.exc_info())  File "C:\Python26\lib\shutil.py", line 219, in rmtree    os.remove(fullname) WindowsError: [Error 5] Access is denied: 'build\\tcl\\tcl8.5\\msgs\\af.msg' 

Looking in File Properties dialog I noticed that af.msg file is set to be read-only.

So the question is: what is the simplest workaround/fix to get around this problem - given that my intention is to do an equivalent of rm -rf build/ but on Windows? (without having to use third-party tools like unxutils or cygwin - as this code is targeted to be run on a bare Windows install with Python 2.6 w/ PyWin32 installed)

Answer 1

Check this question out: What user do python scripts run as in windows?

Apparently the answer is to change the file/folder to not be read-only and then remove it.

Here's onerror() handler from pathutils.py mentioned by @Sridhar Ratnakumar in comments:

def onerror(func, path, exc_info):     """     Error handler for ``shutil.rmtree``.      If the error is due to an access error (read only file)     it attempts to add write permission and then retries.      If the error is for another reason it re-raises the error.          Usage : ``shutil.rmtree(path, onerror=onerror)``     """     import stat     # Is the error an access error?     if not os.access(path, os.W_OK):         os.chmod(path, stat.S_IWUSR)         func(path)     else:         raise