Moving and Deleting Files

00:00 Moving and Deleting Files. Through pathlib, you also have access to basic file system level operations like moving, updating, and even deleting files.

00:11 For the most part, these methods do not give a warning or wait for confirmation before information or files are lost, so you need to be careful when using these methods.

00:22 To move a file, use .replace(). Note that if the destination already exists, .replace() will overwrite it. Unfortunately, pathlib does not explicitly support safe moving of files.

00:36 To avoid possibly overwriting the destination path, the simplest route is to test whether the destination exists before replacing it. However, this does leave the door open for a possible race condition.

00:48 Another process may add a file at the destination path between the execution of the if statement and the .replace() method.

00:57 If that’s a concern, a safer way is to open the destination path for exclusive creation and explicitly copy the source data, as seen on-screen. This code will raise a FileExistsError if the destination already exists.

01:12 Technically, this copies a file. To perform a move, delete the source file after the copy is done, but make sure no exception was raised before you do this.

01:24 When you’re renaming files, iseful methods might be .with_name() and .with_suffix(). They both return the original path, but with the name or the suffix replaced, respectively.

01:38 You can see this in action on-screen.

02:04 Directories and files can be deleted using .rmdir() and .unlink(), respectively. But again, you need to ensure that you are doing this with appropriate care and consideration.

02:14 In the next section of the course, you’ll see how easy pathlib makes it to select specific components of a path.