Garry Willgoose wrote:

I'm trying to remove a directory that has within it a directory tree structure 
and files and thought the following would work (the online docs seem to suggest 
it will remove the underlying directory tree and included files)

shutil.rmtree('test_directory')

but I got back an error (Python 2.7 on OSX)


Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File 
"/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.0/lib/python2.7/shutil.py", 
line 253, in rmtree
    onerror(os.rmdir, path, sys.exc_info())
  File 
"/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.0/lib/python2.7/shutil.py", 
line 251, in rmtree
    os.rmdir(path)
OSError: [Errno 66] Directory not empty: 'test_directory'


which seems to suggest that the directory has to be empty to work ... sort of 
defeats the purpose of wanting to removing the tree in one command. What do 
people suggest short of calling os.system('rm -R test_directory').

No, the directory doesn't have to be empty. It's hard to say what's wrong, but my guess would be that there's a file in test_directory that you don't have permission to remove.



--
Steven

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