python - Can't remove a folder with os.remove (WindowsError: [Error 5] Access is denied: 'c:/temp/New Folder')

Question

I'm working on a test case for which I create some subdirs. However, I don't seem to have the permission to remove them anymore. My UA is an Administrator account (Windows XP).

I first tried:

folder="c:/temp/" 
for dir in os.listdir(folder): 
    os.remove(folder+dir)

and then

folder="c:/temp/" 
os.remove(folder+"New Folder")

because I'm sure "New Folder" is empty. However, in all cases I get:

Traceback (most recent call last): 
  File "<string>", line 3, in <module> 
WindowsError: [Error 5] Access is denied: 'c:/temp/New Folder'

Does anybody know what's going wrong?

Answer 1

os.remove requires a file path, and raises OSError if path is a directory.

Try os.rmdir(folder+'New Folder')

Which will:

Remove (delete) the directory path. Only works when the directory is empty, otherwise, OSError is raised.

Making paths is also safer using os.path.join:

os.path.join("c:", "temp", "new folder")