How to remove a lot of folders at once using Python?

Question

I have seen a lot of questions (Delete Folder Contents in Python, How to delete a file or folder?, How do I remove/delete a folder that is not empty with Python?) asking how to delete a folder (empty or not) but I haven't seen any asking about how to delete a large number of folders at once.

I tried using shutils and writing something as shutils.rmtree('.../run*') (all the folders that I want to delete are called run0000, run0001 and so on) but this doesn't work because * is not understood.

I finally ended up importing subprocess and using subprocess.Popen('rm -r ./run*/', shell=True) which works because of the shell=True but I would like to avoid this due to the security related hazards that discourage the use of shell=True.

What is the best way to erase a large number of folders (non-empty) at once? I think that it must be to adapt some of the answers given in one of the linked questions but I haven't been able so far. How could I do it?

Answer 1

You could use the glob module to locate the directories, then use shutil.rmtree() on each:

from glob import iglob
import shutil

for path in iglob('.../run*'):
    shutil.rmtree(path)

Because you don't need to have a complete list of all matched directories, I used glob.iglob() to yield matched paths one by one.