3

edited

i created symlinks to a directory, on Widnows7, using mklink command line:

mklink /d books config

i'm trying to delete it with python 2.7 (still on windows).

>>> os.remove('books')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    sym = symlink_to_dir
    os.unlink(sym) # 
WindowsError: [Error 5] Access is denied: 'books'

there are no restrictions on that machine, i'm admin, and i didn't have problems to delete it from Windows (del books)

There's no problem deleting a link to a file (as opposed to a dir).

why is that?

edit "del" didn't work, it just didn't return an error.

warvariuc
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Berry Tsakala
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  • What does "there are no permissions on that machine" mean? Taken literally, it makes the answer pretty obvious: if you have no permissions, you should be getting access denied for everything. But I can't figure out any way to take it that makes more sense… – abarnert Oct 24 '14 at 18:53
  • Meanwhile, any chance the symlink is in use? For example have you `cd`'d to the symlink (or a subdirectory through the symlink) in a running cmd.exe shell? – abarnert Oct 24 '14 at 18:56
  • One last thing: You almost certainly don't want `os.system('del '+sym)`. That gives you no way to tell whether it succeeded or failed, it will not work if `sym` has any spaces or various other special characters, etc. If you really need to run an external command, use `subprocess`, not `os.system`. – abarnert Oct 24 '14 at 18:59
  • Also, is `'static'` the name of the file? – abarnert Oct 24 '14 at 19:01

2 Answers2

3

oops, i overlooked it:

since it's a link to a directory, windows, unlike linux, consider the symlink as a directory, therefore:

from DOS:

c:\> rmdir symlink

from python:

>>> os.rmdir( 'symlink' )

and NOT "del symlink", nor "os.unlink()", nor "os.remove()".

This is how it looks like in Linux:

$ mkdir a
$ ln -s a b
$ rm b          #ok, since a symlink is treated as a file

$ ln -s a b
$ rmdir b       # error, not a file
rmdir: failed to remove `b': Not a directory
Berry Tsakala
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  • Yes, ```os.rmdir()``` is the correct way to remove a symlink to a directory on Windows. I can confirm that the contents of the original directory won't be removed. – Rockallite Apr 30 '15 at 03:54
1

I will make a guess. What you have may not be a symlink like the ones on *INX, but rather a hard link. You should be able to os.remove() to remove the hard link.

Roger Jiang
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