Most pythonic way to delete a file which may not exist

Question

I want to delete the file filename if it exists   Is it proper to say  if os path exists filename       os remove filename    Is there a better way  A one-line way

User · Answer

Matt s answer is the right one for older Pythons and Kevin s the right answer for newer ones   If you wish not to copy the function for silentremove  this functionality is exposed in path py as remove p   from path import Path Path filename  remove p

User · Answer

if os path exists filename   os remove filename    is a one-liner   Many of you may disagree - possibly for reasons like considering the proposed use of ternaries  ugly  - but this begs the question of whether we should listen to people used to ugly standards when they call something non-standard  ugly

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In the spirit of Andy Jones  answer  how about an authentic ternary operation   os remove fn  if os path exists fn  else None

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As of Python 3 8  use missing ok True and pathlib Path unlink  docs here   from pathlib import Path  my file   Path    dir1 dir2 file txt      Python 3 8  my file unlink missing ok True     Python 3 7 and earlier if my file exists        my file unlink

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In Python 3 4 or later version  the pythonic way would be   import os from contextlib import suppress  with suppress OSError       os remove filename

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I prefer to suppress an exception rather than checking for the file s existence  to avoid a TOCTTOU bug   Matt s answer is a good example of this  but we can simplify it slightly under Python 3  using contextlib suppress     import contextlib  with contextlib suppress FileNotFoundError       os remove filename    If filename is a pathlib Path object instead of a string  we can call its  unlink   method instead of using os remove     In my experience  Path objects are more useful than strings for filesystem manipulation   Since everything in this answer is exclusive to Python 3  it provides yet another reason to upgrade

User · Answer

Another way to know if the file  or files  exists  and to remove it  is using the module glob   from glob import glob import os  for filename in glob    csv        os remove filename    Glob finds all the files that could select the pattern with a  nix wildcard  and loops the list

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A KISS offering   def remove if exists filename     if os path exists filename       os remove filename    And then   remove if exists  my file

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This is another solution   if os path isfile os path join path  filename        os remove os path join path  filename

User · Answer

A more pythonic way would be   try      os remove filename  except OSError      pass   Although this takes even more lines and looks very ugly  it avoids the unnecessary call to os path exists   and follows the python convention of overusing exceptions   It may be worthwhile to write a function to do this for you   import os  errno  def silentremove filename       try          os remove filename      except OSError as e    this would be  except OSError  e   before Python 2 6         if e errno    errno ENOENT    errno ENOENT   no such file or directory             raise   re-raise exception if a different error occurred

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Another solution with your own message in exception   import os  try      os remove filename  except      print  Not able to delete the file  s    filename

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Something like this  Takes advantage of short-circuit evaluation  If the file does not exist  the whole conditional cannot be true  so python will not bother evaluation the second part    os path exists  gogogo php   and os remove  gogogo php

User · Answer

os path exists returns True for folders as well as files  Consider using os path isfile to check for whether the file exists instead

[python] Most pythonic way to delete a file which may not exist

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