Qt Remove Directory and Its Contents

When dealing with directories, Qt has a large number of functions to make manipulating them easy. However, it does not include a way to delete a non-empty directory. This little omission is easily solved.

Following is a recursive function that will delete a directory along with all of it’s contents. This will delete depth first. Meaning it will recurse into sub-directories and only start deleting once the directory has no sub-directories. Changing QDir::DirsFirst to QDir::DirsLast will change this into a breadth first search.

fileutils.h

#ifndef FILEUTILS_H
#define FILEUTILS_H

#include <QString>

class FileUtils
{
public:
    static bool removeDir(const QString &dirName);
};

#endif // FILEUTILS_H

fileutils.cpp

#include <QDir>
#include <QFile>
#include <QFileInfo>
#include <QFileInfoList>

#include "fileutils.h"

/*!
   Delete a directory along with all of its contents.

   param dirName Path of directory to remove.
   return true on success; false on error.
*/
bool FileUtils::removeDir(const QString &dirName)
{
    bool result = true;
    QDir dir(dirName);

    if (dir.exists(dirName)) {
        Q_FOREACH(QFileInfo info, dir.entryInfoList(QDir::NoDotAndDotDot | QDir::System | QDir::Hidden  | QDir::AllDirs | QDir::Files, QDir::DirsFirst)) {
            if (info.isDir()) {
                result = removeDir(info.absoluteFilePath());
            }
            else {
                result = QFile::remove(info.absoluteFilePath());
            }

            if (!result) {
                return result;
            }
        }
        result = dir.rmdir(dirName);
    }

    return result;
}