Remove directory which is not empty

Question

Remove directory which is not empty

In my Node application I need to remove a directory which has some files, but fs.rmdir only works on empty directories. How can I do this?

node.js
filesystems

Answer 1

There is a module for this called rimraf it provides the same functionality of rm -Rf

https://npmjs.org/package/rimraf

Answer 2

I wrote this function called remove folder. It will recursively remove all the files and folders in a location. The only package it requires is async.

var async = require('async');

function removeFolder(location, next) {
    fs.readdir(location, function (err, files) {
        async.each(files, function (file, cb) {
            file = location + '/' + file
            fs.stat(file, function (err, stat) {
                if (err) {
                    return cb(err);
                }
                if (stat.isDirectory()) {
                    removeFolder(file, cb);
                } else {
                    fs.unlink(file, function (err) {
                        if (err) {
                            return cb(err);
                        }
                        return cb();
                    })
                }
            })
        }, function (err) {
            if (err) return next(err)
            fs.rmdir(location, function (err) {
                return next(err)
            })
        })
    })
}

Answer 3

Another workaround way is to run a shell command from Node.

var execSync = require('exec-sync');
execSync("rm -r " + yourPathHere);

Of course, you should npm install exec-sync first.