Os.Remove

A directory may have many files in it. With os.Remove, we can remove just 1 file at a time. But it is possible to use a loop to remove all files in the directory.

With Readdir, we get a slice of all the files in a directory. We can then get the full paths of each file, and pass those to the os.Remove method. All files are deleted in the folder.

Example

To begin, we specify a target directory—you will want to adjust this to point to a location on your computer. Use a path syntax for your target platform.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "os"
)

func main() {
    // Part 1: open the directory and read all its files.
    directory := "/home/sam/test/"
    dirRead, _ := os.Open(directory)
    dirFiles, _ := dirRead.Readdir(0)

    // Part 2: loop over the directory's files.
    for index := range(dirFiles) {
        fileHere := dirFiles[index]

        // Part 3: get name of file and its full path.
        nameHere := fileHere.Name()
        fullPath := directory + nameHere
        os.Remove(fullPath)
        fmt.Println("Removed file:", fullPath)
    }
}
Removed file: /home/sam/test/Untitled Document 3
Removed file: /home/sam/test/Untitled Document
Removed file: /home/sam/test/Untitled Document 2

Notes, results

You can see that there were 3 Untitled Documents that were removed when the program was executed. These were in the folder when I ran the Go program.

Notes, validation

Before deleting many files, it sometimes helps to have a confirmation, or some sort of logic test. It can be hard to recover from a mass deletion made in error.

Review

We can directly invoke os.Remove with a path argument to delete a file. And in a loop (one based on the result of Readdir) we can delete the entire contents of a directory.