Why Does Directory.Delete(true) Throw 'The Directory is Not Empty'?

Completely delete the directory: limitations and solutions of the Directory.Delete(true) method

When using Directory.Delete(myPath, true) to recursively delete a directory, developers may still encounter a "directory not empty" exception even if recursive is set to true. This is puzzling because the method is meant to delete all of the contents of the directory before deleting it.

Cause Analysis

The behavior in the question arises from limitations of the Directory.Delete method. This method is designed to only allow empty directories to be deleted, while files and subdirectories in the target directory are not affected. When recursive is true , Directory.Delete will attempt to delete any non-empty subdirectories, but will not delete files.

Solution

To solve this problem, you can use a recursive function that explicitly deletes files and subdirectories before trying to delete the parent directory. The following code snippet demonstrates this approach:

public static void DeleteDirectory(string target_dir)
{
    string[] files = Directory.GetFiles(target_dir);
    string[] directories = Directory.GetDirectories(target_dir);

    foreach (string file in files)
    {
        File.Delete(file); // 删除所有文件
    }

    foreach (string directory in directories)
    {
        DeleteDirectory(directory); // 递归删除子目录
    }

    Directory.Delete(target_dir, false); // 删除空父目录
}

By explicitly deleting the files and subdirectories first, we ensure that the parent directory is empty before attempting to delete it. This approach solves the "directory is not empty" exception that occurs when using Directory.Delete(true).

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