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pythonmacosfileunixls

writing command line output to file

I am writing a script to clean up my desktop, moving files based on file type. The first step, it would seem, is to ls -1 /Users/user/Desktop (I'm on Mac OSX). So, using Python, how would I run a command, then write the output to a file in a specific directory? Since this will be undocumented, and I'll be the only user, I don't mind (prefer?) if it uses os.system().

Solution

  • You can redirect standard output to any file using > in command. 

    $ ls /Users/user/Desktop > out.txt

    Using python,

    os.system('ls /Users/user/Desktop > out.txt')

    However, if you are using python then instead of using ls command you can use os.listdir to list all the files in the directory. 

    path = '/Users/user/Desktop'
files = os.listdir(path)
print files