Similarly to how several pathlib file creation functions have an "exists_ok" parameter, we should introduce "missing_ok" that makes removal functions not raise an exception when a file or directory is already absent.

IMHO, this should cover Path.unlink and Path.rmdir.

Note, Path.resolve() has a "strict" parameter since 3.6 that does the same thing. Naming this of this new parameter tries to be consistent with the "exists_ok" parameter as that is more explicit about what it does (as opposed to "strict").

It can be written as

    try:
        path.inlink()
    except FileNotFoundError:
        pass

If you want to save few lines of code, you can use contextlib.suppress().

    with suppress(FileNotFoundError): path.inlink()

I suggest to close this issue. It is better to keep the API simple and orthogonal. Adding an option in Path.unlink() will require adding this support of this option in third-part implementations of Path. In general, adding a single boolean parameter is not considered a good practice in Python.

A "strict" parameter in Path.resolve() does the different thing. In both cases Path.resolve() returns a value, and you can't implement strict=False by catching exception externally.

This would be a shortcut in the common case that you simply want an idempotent "make sure this file/symlink is gone" operation.

There are already boolean options to enable idempotent behaviour in several pathlib implementations, such as mkdir(exist_ok=True) and touch(exist_ok=True). write_bytes() and write_text() are also idempotent. unlink() aligns well with this.

Because this operation doesn't exist, developers are tempted to write

    if path.exists():
        path.unlink()

which both has a TOCTTOU bug and doesn't correctly handle symlinks.

New changeset d9e006bcefe6fac859b1b5d741725b9a91991044 by Miss Islington (bot) (‮zlohhcuB treboR) in branch 'master':
bpo-33123: pathlib: Add missing_ok parameter to Path.unlink (GH-6191)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/d9e006bcefe6fac859b1b5d741725b9a91991044