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.
