Deleting Files

Removing files and directories is a common task. Deno has a number of functions for this task.

In the case that we want to remove a simple file, we can simply call Deno.remove with the filename as a parameter

await Deno.remove("example.txt");

There is also a sync version of the api available

Deno.removeSync("example.txt");

If we want to remove a directory, we could do exactly what we did above. If the directory has contents, the call would error out. If we want to recursively delete the contents of a directory, we should set recursive to true

await Deno.remove("./dir", { recursive: true });

A common pattern is to remove a file or directory only if it already exists. The correct way of doing this is by just doing it and trying to catch any NotFound errors.

try {
  await Deno.remove("example.txt");
} catch (err) {
  if (!(err instanceof Deno.errors.NotFound)) {
    throw err;
  }
}

Additional resources:

Doc: Deno.remove