In this article, we will see how to safely delete files and folders using the send2trash module in Python. Using send2trash, we can send files to the Trash or Recycle Bin instead of permanently deleting them. The OS module’s unlink(), remove() and rmdir() functions can be used to delete files or folders. But, these functions delete the files permanently. The operations cannot be undone if there were any accidental deletions performed. This can be prevented using send2trash.
Modules required
- OS : The OS module in Python provides functions for interacting with the operating system. OS module comes with Python’s Standard Library.
- send2trash : Send2Trash is a small package that sends files to the Trash (or Recycle Bin) natively and on all platforms. To install it type the below command in the terminal.
pip install send2trash
Deleting a file or folder
The send2trash() function accepts the location of the file or folder to be deleted.
Python3
import send2trash send2trash.send2trash("/location/to/file") |
The process of deleting a directory is same as above. If the directory contains files or other folders, those are also deleted. A TrashPermissionError exception is raised, in case a file could not be deleted due to permission error or any other unexpected reason.
Deleting specific files in a directory
We can use the os.walk() function to walk through a directory and delete specific files. In the example below, we will delete all ‘.txt’ files in the given directory.
Python3
import os import send2trash # walking through the directory for folder, subfolders, files in os.walk('/Users/tithighosh/Documents'): for file in files: # checking if file is # of .txt type if file.endswith('.txt'): path = os.path.join(folder, file) # printing the path of the file # to be deleted print('deleted : ', path ) # deleting the file send2trash.send2trash(path) |
Output :
deleted : /Users/tithighosh/Documents/cfile.txt deleted : /Users/tithighosh/Documents/e_also_big_output.txt deleted : /Users/tithighosh/Documents/res.txt deleted : /Users/tithighosh/Documents/tk.txt
