shutil.rmtree to remove readonly files

python shutil
Paul Moore picture Paul Moore · Jan 21, 2014 · Viewed 14.4k times · Source

I want to use shutil.rmtree in Python to remove a directory. The directory in question contains a .git control directory, which git marks as read-only and hidden.

The read-only flag causes rmtree to fail. In Powershell, I would do "del -force" to force removal of the read-only flag. Is there an equivalent in Python? I'd really rather not walk the whole tree twice, but the onerror argument to rmtree doesn't seem to retry the operation, so I can't use

def set_rw(operation, name, exc):
    os.chmod(name, stat.S_IWRITE)

shutil.rmtree('path', onerror=set_rw)

Answer

Paul Moore picture Paul Moore · Jan 21, 2014

After more investigation, the following appears to work:

def del_rw(action, name, exc):
    os.chmod(name, stat.S_IWRITE)
    os.remove(name)
shutil.rmtree(path, onerror=del_rw)

In other words, actually remove the file in the onerror function. (You might need to check for a directory in the onerror handler and use rmdir in that case - I didn't need that but it may just be something specific about my problem.

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