How to delete a folder in Java

In this blog post, I will be demonstrating how you can delete a folder in Java. Consider the following code snippet:

</pre>
package learnjava.io;

import java.io.File;

public class DeleteDirectory {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String fileName = "F:/TestFolder";
File file = new File(fileName);
if (file.exists()) {
if (file.isDirectory()) {
File[] files = file.listFiles();
if (files.length == 0) {
System.out.println("Folder is empty so deleting it");
if (file.delete()) {
System.out.println("Deleted file successfully");
} else
System.out.println("Error in deleting file");
} else {
System.out.println("There are " + files.length + " files in the folder, so folder cannot be deleted");
}
} else {
System.out.println("F:/Test.txt is not a folder");
}
} else
System.out.println("Folder F:/TestFolder1 is missing, so could not be deleted");

}
}
<pre>

There is a file.delete method that can be used to delete a folder. However, if the folder has some files, the delete method fails. So first you need to check if there are files in the folder. You can do this by using the file.isDirectory method which returns a true if the path given to it is a directory and the file.list method which returns an array of the files in the directory. So assuming the TestFolder is empty, when you run the code, it will print the following output:

Folder is empty so deleting it
Deleted file successfully