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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T16:51:40+00:00

I’m trying to remove a directory using python but I do not want to

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I’m trying to remove a directory using python but I do not want to recursively remove the whole directory path in the process: i.e

/home/dir/dir/dirtoberemoved

So I don’t want to remove anything at a higher level just the one directory and all its contents. I’ve been looking on stackoverflow to research this question and most answers have included using the shutil module which I am unfamiliar with, looking at the python documentation for the module it says ‘Delete an entire directory tree’

If I do something like this:

    if os.path.exists("/home/dir/dir/dirtoberemoved");

        shutil.rmtree("/home/dir/dir/dirtoberemoved");

or 

         shutil.rmtree("/dirtoberemoved");

Will the entire path be removed? If so is there any good way just to delete one non-empty directory in python without deleting higher level directories?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You need to specify the whole path to the directory to be removed. Only the last part of the path will be deleted, the /home/dir/dir/ part will be untouched.

    The deletion refers to any sub-directories contained within the named path, so if there is a /home/dir/dir/dirtoberemoved/foo sub-directory it’ll be removed together with it’s parent.

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