How to delete the contents within a folder without deleting the folder using python

Question

This is my first question here on Stack overflow. I am very new in programming area and after going though some of the videos and links , I start to write my python program which I learn from google.

Here I am trying to run a program where I need to delete the folder in particular path(Starting with name CXP) which is 7 days old.

But here is two problems.

1. Deleting a folder using shutil is actually deleting the Main folder b instead of the folder inside the b which start with CXP. Thanks for this stack over flow as i am learning and practicing from here.

import os, time
import shutil

dir_name =  os.path.expanduser("") + "/proj/a/b/"
test = os.listdir(dir_name)
now = time.time()

print(test)
for fname in os.listdir(dir_name):
    if fname.startswith("CXP"):
        folderstamp = os.stat(os.path.join(dir_name, fname)).st_mtime
        foldercompare = now - 7 * 86400
        if folderstamp < foldercompare:
                shutil.rmtree(dir_name)

Answer 1

Your script is deleting the main folder because this is what is implemented. Note that you are doing checks based on fname, but later use shutil.rmtree(dir_name) if the condition is met. You need to correct the argument given to shutil.rmtree:

import os
import time
import shutil

dir_name = os.path.expanduser("") + "/proj/a/b/"
test = os.listdir(dir_name)
now = time.time()

print(test)
for fname in os.listdir(dir_name):
    if fname.startswith("CXP"):
        folder = os.path.join(dir_name, fname)
        folderstamp = os.stat(folder).st_mtime
        foldercompare = now - 7 * 86400
        if folderstamp < foldercompare:
            shutil.rmtree(folder)