shutil.rmtree() clarification

If noob is a directory, the shutil.rmtree() function will delete noob and all files and subdirectories below it. That is, noob is the root of the tree to be removed.

This will definitely only delete the last directory in the specified path. Just try it out:

mkdir -p foo/bar
python
import shutil
shutil.rmtree('foo/bar')

...will only remove 'bar'.

There is some misunderstanding here.

Imagine a tree like this:

 - user
   - tester
     - noob
   - developer
     - guru

If you want to delete user, just do shutil.rmtree('user'). This will also delete user/tester and user/tester/noob as they are inside user. However, it will also delete user/developer and user/developer/guru, as they are also inside user.

If rmtree('user/tester/noob') would delete user and tester, how do you mean user/developer would exist if user is gone?

Or do you mean something like http://docs.python.org/2/library/os.html#os.removedirs ?

It tries to remove the parent of each removed directory until it fails because the directory is not empty. So in my example tree, os.removedirs('user/tester/noob') would remove first noob, then it would try to remove tester, which is ok because it's empty, but it would stop at user and leave it alone, because it contains developer, which we do not want to delete.