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I'm modifying the Arrows plugin by Gregoire Piffault. It writes the output to a shapefile, but if the shapefile already exists it fails. He tries to remove the file using QgsMapLayerRegistry.instance().removeMapLayer then write a new one using QgsVectorFileWriter, which results in an empty file; if the file doesn't already exist it works fine.

I've tried simply deleting the file using os.remove after the call to removeMapLayer, but the file is still locked.

os.remove(self.conf["arrow_outshape"]) WindowsError: [Error 32] The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process: u'C:/GIS/SK/Saskatoon/mpArrows.shp

I think there are two options:

  1. change the code substantially to allow for editing the existing file rather than creating a new one if it already is loaded
  2. figure out how to completely unload the file after removing the map layer so that I can delete it
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In a plugin of mine I have a similair problem and I use the ogr library to delete shape files. You could try something like this:

from osgeo import ogr driver = ogr.GetDriverByName('ESRI Shapefile') driver.DeleteDataSource('path_to_your_shape.shp')

More informations about python and ogr you can find here: osgeo.ogr

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    this works sometimes. Other times I get an OGRERR_NOT_ENOUGH_DATA error on the call to DeleteDataSource. Can't really pin down what determines success but if I restart QGis I can generally run through it twice before it will fail! Commented Jul 19, 2016 at 20:51
  • I get the same problem as you @marcp, did you find another way to delete an existing shapefile or perhaps find a way to overwrite an existing file using QgsVectorFileWriter? Commented May 28, 2018 at 8:50
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    No I never sid, @15step. Once I struggled through that project I never needed that plugin again. Commented May 28, 2018 at 12:50

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