Deleting the contents of a directory in Rust

There are various ways to delete the contents of a directory. You could, for example, delete the directory itself with fs::remove_dir_all and then create a new directory with the same name.

A more refined solution, which will go through the contents of a directory and delete each child without actually destroying and recreating the parent, looks like this:

use std::fs::{self, ReadDir};
use std::io::Error;

fn main() {
    let demo_dir = fs::read_dir("/path/to/dir");
    delete_dir_contents(demo_dir);
}

fn delete_dir_contents(read_dir_res: Result<ReadDir, Error>) {
    if let Ok(dir) = read_dir_res {
        for entry in dir {
            if let Ok(entry) = entry {
                let path = entry.path();

                if path.is_dir() {
                    fs::remove_dir_all(path).expect("Failed to remove a dir");
                } else {
                    fs::remove_file(path).expect("Failed to remove a file");
                }
            };
        }
    };
}

ReadDir provides an iterator over the contents of a directory. It’s worth noting that it’s a non-recursive iterator, which is why we’re using fs::remove_dir_all here. That standard function will delete a directory along with all of it’s contents, which avoids us having to recursively walk and delete. As I’m here, I’ll recommend the walkdir crate for all of your recursive walking needs though.

Note: In production, the delete_dir_contents function is the sort of thing you’d probably want to break out into a utils module.