Unable to delete files from folder using os.remove() in python

Question

I am dealing with a file directory in python, where I want to delete files containing a specific string, ultimately using os.remove(), but I just cannot get it to work. I will elaborate further here by showing the code I am using:

directory = 'source_folder'
for color in colors:
 for size in sizes:
 for speed in speeds:
 
 source = os.listdir(os.path.join(directory, color, size, speed))
 
 for file in source:
 if "p_1" in file:
 print(file)

And this prints out all the files in the directory that contain the string excerpt "p_1" in the file name, which is what I would expect. Each "for" nesting represents navigating to another folder level in my directory hierarchy.

What I want to do is delete every file that does NOT contain "p_1" in the file name. And so I tried:

directory = 'source_folder'
for color in colors:
 for size in sizes:
 for speed in speeds:
 
 source = os.listdir(os.path.join(directory, color, size, speed))
 
 for file in source:
 if "p_1" not in file:
 os.remove(file)

but this returns:

FileNotFoundError: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified: 'Name_of_one_of_the_files_I_want_to_delete'

I don't see where my logic is wrong here, since I can print the files I want to delete, but for some reason I can't delete them. How can I fix my code to delete those files that contain the string excerpt "p_1" in the file name?

• tdelaney: That print(file) is your best clue. It printed a file name, not the filename plus directory. You need to add the directory to that name.

Answer 1

You need to specify the directory for the file to be removed. I would create a variable to hold the string of the file path like this:

directory = 'source_folder'
for color in colors:
 for size in sizes:
 for speed in speeds:
 
 some_path = os.path.join(directory, color, size, speed)
 source = os.listdir(some_path)
 
 for file in source:
 if "p_1" not in file:
 os.remove("/".join(some_path,file))