Simplest way to clobber/replace one populated directory with another?

Tue May 15 12:37:30 EDT 2018

I have a directory structure that might look something like:
 Data
 Current
 A
 B 
 C 
 Previous
 A 
 X
In as simple/quick a step as possible, I want to rename Current as Previous including the contents and wiping out the original such that it is now:
 Data
 Previous
 A
 B
 C
I've tried something like:
 from pathlib import Path
 src = Path('Data/Current’)
 dest = Path('Data/Previous’)
 src.replace(dest)
The docs led me to hope this would work:
 "If target points to an existing file or directory, it will be unconditionally replaced.”
But it *does* appear to be conditional. I get a "Directory not empty" exception. I guess I could recursively delete the ‘Previous' directory first. Is that basically the only solution? Or is there a better way to achieve this?
(I prefer `pathlib`, but if `os` or `shutil` is the better hammer here, I'm not opposed to them)
(I am running on Linux)