Looking for File Traversal Functions in Python that are Like Java's

Question

In Java you can do File.listFiles() and receive all of the files in a directory. You can then easily recurse through directory trees.

Is there an analogous way to do this in Python?

Answer 1

Yes, there is. The Python way is even better.

There are three possibilities:

1) Like File.listFiles():

Python has the function os.listdir(path). It works like the Java method.

2) pathname pattern expansion with glob:

The module glob contains functions to list files on the file system using Unix shell like pattern, e.g.

files = glob.glob('/usr/joe/*.gif')

3) File Traversal with walk:

Really nice is the os.walk function of Python.

The walk method returns a generation function that recursively list all directories and files below a given starting path.

An Example:

import os
from os.path import join
for root, dirs, files in os.walk('/usr'):
   print "Current directory", root
   print "Sub directories", dirs
   print "Files", files

You can even on the fly remove directories from "dirs" to avoid walking to that dir: if "joe" in dirs: dirs.remove("joe") to avoid walking into directories called "joe".

listdir and walk are documented here. glob is documented here.