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I want to delete all files with the extension .bak in a directory. How can I do that in Python?

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9 Answers 9

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322

Via os.listdir and os.remove:

import os filelist = [ f for f in os.listdir(mydir) if f.endswith(".bak") ] for f in filelist: os.remove(os.path.join(mydir, f))

Using only a single loop:

for f in os.listdir(mydir): if not f.endswith(".bak"): continue os.remove(os.path.join(mydir, f))

Or via glob.glob:

import glob, os, os.path filelist = glob.glob(os.path.join(mydir, "*.bak")) for f in filelist: os.remove(f)

Be sure to be in the correct directory, eventually using os.chdir.

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6 Comments

Your first example is using redundant for loops. You can one pass with - [ os.remove(f) for f in os.listdir(".") if f.endswith(".bak") ] - as list comprehensions are meant to be used. Or you can move the 'if' in the comprehension into the for loop - for f in os.listdir("."): if f.endswith(".bak"): os.remove(f)
@slh2080 Since you say the problem has been solved, why not mark the answer as the correct answer?
Watch out the os.listdir(".")!!! I used this code and forgot to change the path, all my code were gone!!! Tried two different utilities to recover but with no luck!!
@LeiGuo Fixed that.
@dragonjujo I would argue that invoking side effects are very much not how list comprehensions are meant to be used.
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In Python 3.5, os.scandir is better if you need to check for file attributes or type - see os.DirEntry for properties of the object that's returned by the function. 

import os for file in os.scandir(path): if file.name.endswith(".bak"): os.unlink(file.path)

This also doesn't require changing directories since each DirEntry already includes the full path to the file.

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3 Comments

You're missing a colon, the first line inside the for loop should be if file.name.endswith(".bak"):
Thanks! That'll teach me to write code without actually running them
hi, how to create path object ?
26

Use os.chdir to change directory . Use glob.glob to generate a list of file names which end it '.bak'. The elements of the list are just strings.

Then you could use os.unlink to remove the files. (PS. os.unlink and os.remove are synonyms for the same function.)

#!/usr/bin/env python import glob import os directory='/path/to/dir' os.chdir(directory) files=glob.glob('*.bak') for filename in files: os.unlink(filename)
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8

you can create a function. Add maxdepth as you like for traversing subdirectories.

def findNremove(path,pattern,maxdepth=1): cpath=path.count(os.sep) for r,d,f in os.walk(path): if r.count(os.sep) - cpath <maxdepth: for files in f: if files.endswith(pattern): try: print "Removing %s" % (os.path.join(r,files)) #os.remove(os.path.join(r,files)) except Exception,e: print e else: print "%s removed" % (os.path.join(r,files)) path=os.path.join("/home","dir1","dir2") findNremove(path,".bak")
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2

First glob them, then unlink.

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Link-only answer. Answers should contain the relevant part. If the link is removed, this is just a comment. How to Answer "First glob them, then unlink." seems like a LQA or NAA.
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I realize this is old; however, here would be how to do so using just the os module...

def purgedir(parent): for root, dirs, files in os.walk(parent): for item in files: # Delete subordinate files filespec = os.path.join(root, item) if filespec.endswith('.bak'): os.unlink(filespec) for item in dirs: # Recursively perform this operation for subordinate directories purgedir(os.path.join(root, item))
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1

For one line solution (Both Windows and Linux) ;

import glob,os for file in glob.glob("<your_path>/*.bak"): print(file," these will be deleted") if input("continue ?") == "Y": for file in glob.glob("<your_path>/*.bak"): os.remove(file)
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0

Or using pathlib.Path:

from pathlib import Path for file in Path("/path/to/folder").glob("*"): file.unlink()

This way one also could specify to only delete files that match the glob pattern. For example: .glob("*.txt") to only remove text files.

And for a recursive removal of all files in subfolders just use rglob instead of glob. The following would delete all txt-files in the specified folder and all it's subfolders:

for file in Path("/path/to/folder").rglob("*.txt"): file.unlink()
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-1

On Linux and macOS you can run simple command to the shell:

subprocess.run('rm /tmp/*.bak', shell=True)
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4 Comments

Not a good choice in my opinion. It's not portable and it's probably more expensive due to the extra subprocess. Better to use Python APIs.
this solution is platform dependent, whereas Python is platform agnostic.
On the other hand, not being able to empty a directory with a single command is insane, so this is simple and elegant.
I don't understand the downvote. The answer states this only will work on certain OSes, and chances are there are loads of people deploying their code to a known platform.

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