Question

I’m building a simple function that works (delete the files). But In the end I want to return the list of the files that were effectively deleted.

This is the function:

def deleteFiles(files):
    # empty list
    RemovedFiles = list()

    for file in files:
        # Delete the file
        if os.remove(file):
            RemovedFiles.append(file)

    return RemovedFiles

I run this function with:

print deleteFiles([/home/xyz/xyz.zip])

This effectively deletes the xyz.zip but returns an empty list: []. What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

The problem is that os.remove does not return anything.

You can however try and except:

for filename in filenames:
    try:
        # try to remove the file
        os.remove(filename)
    except OSError:
        pass
        # file not removed (maybe does not exist or is write-protected)
        # you may report an error here
    else:
        # this executes only if os.remove was successful
        RemovedFiles.append(filename)