Question

I am trying to remove a directory with rmdir, but I received the ‘Directory not empty’ message, because it still has files in it.

What function can I use to remove a directory with all the files in it as well?

Answer 1

There is no built-in function to do this, but see the comments at the bottom of https://www.php.net/rmdir. A number of commenters posted their own recursive directory deletion functions. You can take your pick from those.

Here’s one that looks decent:

function deleteDirectory($dir) {
    if (!file_exists($dir)) {
        return true;
    }

    if (!is_dir($dir)) {
        return unlink($dir);
    }

    foreach (scandir($dir) as $item) {
        if ($item == '.' || $item == '..') {
            continue;
        }

        if (!deleteDirectory($dir . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . $item)) {
            return false;
        }

    }

    return rmdir($dir);
}

You could just invoke rm -rf if you want to keep things simple. That does make your script UNIX-only, so beware of that. If you go that route I would try something like:

function deleteDirectory($dir) {
    system('rm -rf -- ' . escapeshellarg($dir), $retval);
    return $retval == 0; // UNIX commands return zero on success
}