Deleting large numbers of files in python

If you actually want to delete the whole directory tree, shutils.rmtree should be faster than os.remove (which is the same as os.unlink). It also allows you to specify a callback function to handle errors.

The suggestion in the comment by @nmichaels is also good, you can os.rename the directory then make a new one in its place and use shutils.rmtree on the original, renamed directory.