Delete directories recursively in Java
One-liner solution (Java8) to delete all files and directories recursively including starting directory:
try (var dirStream = Files.walk(Paths.get("c:/dir_to_delete/"))) {
dirStream
.map(Path::toFile)
.sorted(Comparator.reverseOrder())
.forEach(File::delete);
}
We use a comparator for reversed order, otherwise File::delete won't be able to delete possibly non-empty directory. So, if you want to keep directories and only delete files just remove the comparator in sorted() or remove sorting completely and add files filter:
try (var dirStream = Files.walk(Paths.get("c:/dir_to_delete/"))) {
dirStream
.filter(Files::isRegularFile)
.map(Path::toFile)
.forEach(File::delete);
}
You should check out Apache's commons-io. It has a FileUtils class that will do what you want.
FileUtils.deleteDirectory(new File("directory"));
In Java 7+ you can use Files
class. Code is very simple:
Path directory = Paths.get("/tmp");
Files.walkFileTree(directory, new SimpleFileVisitor<Path>() {
@Override
public FileVisitResult visitFile(Path file, BasicFileAttributes attrs) throws IOException {
Files.delete(file);
return FileVisitResult.CONTINUE;
}
@Override
public FileVisitResult postVisitDirectory(Path dir, IOException exc) throws IOException {
Files.delete(dir);
return FileVisitResult.CONTINUE;
}
});
With Java 7, we can finally do this with reliable symlink detection. (I don't consider Apache's commons-io to have reliable symlink detection at this time, as it doesn't handle links on Windows created with mklink
.)
For the sake of history, here's a pre-Java 7 answer, which follows symlinks.
void delete(File f) throws IOException {
if (f.isDirectory()) {
for (File c : f.listFiles())
delete(c);
}
if (!f.delete())
throw new FileNotFoundException("Failed to delete file: " + f);
}