Java Program to Delete a Directory

Java provides the File class for representing a file or directory in the system. The File class is available in java.io package. In order to perform operations on files or directories, the File class provide several useful methods.

The delete() method of the File class is one of the most important methods which is used to delete the files and empty directories represented by the current File object.

Note: When a directory contains some files, it cannot be deleted directly by using the delete() method. For deleting it, we first empty the directory and then delete the folder.

However, we have two ways to delete the files or directories in the system, i.e., using the delete() method of File and using the deleteDirectory() method from commons-io.

Let's understand both the ways to understand how we can delete a directory in the system:

By using the File.delete() Method

The delete() method of the File class is used for deleting a directory. Before using the delete() method, we first call a user-defined method, i.e., deleteDirectory(), that will delete the subfile or subdirectory.

Let's take an example to understand how we can delete a directory by using the delete() method.

DeleteDirectoryExample1.java

// import required classes and package if any
import java.io.File;
import java.util.Scanner;
// create class DeleteDirectoryExample1 for deleting directory by using the delete() method of File class
public class DeleteDirectoryExample1 {
	// main() method start
	public static void main(String args[]) {
		String filePath;
		// create an instance of Scanner class
		Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);
		System.out.println("Enter directory path for deleting a directory.");
		filePath = sc.nextLine();
		// close Scanner class object
		sc.close();
		// create an instance of File for user given file path
		File file = new File(filePath);
        try{
        	// call deleteDirectory() method for deleting the subfile and sub-directory
            deleteDirectory(file);
            // use delete() method of the File for deleting user given directory
            file.delete();
            System.out.println("Your directory is deleted successfully.");
        }catch(Exception e) {
        	System.out.println(e.getMessage());
        }
	}
	// create deleteDirectory() for deleting sub directories and files
    public static void deleteDirectory(File file)
    {
        // use listFiles() method for getting sub files
        for (File subfile : file.listFiles()) {
            // if the subfile is a folder, recursively call the deleteDirectory()method
            if (subfile.isDirectory()) {	// isDirectory() method is used to check whether subfile is a folder or not
            	deleteDirectory(subfile);
            }
            // use delete() method for deleting file and empty folder
            subfile.delete();
        }
    }	
}

Output:

By Using the File.deleteDirectory() Method

There is another way of deleting a directory in Java. We can use the deleteDirectory() method from the commons-io. In order to use the deleteDirectory() method, we need to add the following dependency to maven project:

<dependency>
	<groupId>commons-io</groupId>
	<artifactId>commons-io</artifactId>
	<version>2.5</version>
</dependency>

Let's take an example to understand how we can use commons-io for deleting a directory.

DeleteDirectoryExample2.java

//import required classes and package if any
import java.io.File;
import java.util.Scanner;
import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;
//create class DeleteDirectoryExample2 for deleting directory by using the delete() method from commons-io
public class DeleteDirectoryExample2 {
	// main() method start
	public static void main(String args[]) {
		String filePath;
		// create an instance of Scanner class
		Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);
		System.out.println("Enter directory path for deleting a directory.");
		filePath = sc.nextLine();
		// close Scanner class object
		sc.close();
		// create an instance of File for user given file path
		File file = new File(filePath);
		try{
			// call deleteDirectory() method for deleting the directory
			FileUtils.deleteDirectory(file);
			// use delete() method of the File for deleting the user given directory
			file.delete();
			System.out.println("Your directory is deleted successfully.");
         
		}catch(Exception e) {
			System.out.println(e.getMessage());
		}
	}
}

Output: