Question

I’m trying to remove all files found in a directory. The accepted answer to Delete Folder Contents in Python suggests getting a list of all files and calling “unlink” on them in a loop.

Suppose I have thousands of files on a network share, and want to tie up the directory for as short a time as possible.

Is it more efficient to delete them all using a shell command like rm -f /path/* or by using shutils.rmtree or some such?

Answer 1

If you actually want to delete the whole directory tree, shutils.rmtree should be faster than os.remove (which is the same as os.unlink). It also allows you to specify a callback function to handle errors.

The suggestion in the comment by @nmichaels is also good, you can os.rename the directory then make a new one in its place and use shutils.rmtree on the original, renamed directory.