Simplest way to get the equivalent of "find ." in python?

Question

What is the simplest way to get the full recursive list of files inside a folder with python? I know about os.walk(), but it seems overkill for just getting the unfiltered list of all files. Is it really the only option?

Asked By: static_rtti

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Source

Answer 1

Either that or manually recursing with isdir() / isfile() and listdir() or you could use subprocess.check_output() and call find .. Bascially os.walk() is highest level, slightly lower level is semi-manual solution based on listdir() and if you want the same output find . would give you for some reason you can make a system call with subprocess.

Answered By: kgr

Answer 2

There’s nothing preventing you from creating your own function:

import os

def listfiles(folder):
    for root, folders, files in os.walk(folder):
        for filename in folders + files:
            yield os.path.join(root, filename)

You can use it like so:

for filename in listfiles('/etc/'):
    print filename

Answered By: Blender

Answer 3

import os
path = "path/to/your/dir"
for (path, dirs, files) in os.walk(path):
    print files

Is this overkill, or am I missing something?

Answered By: verbsintransit

Answer 4

os.walk() is not overkill by any means. It can generate your list of files and directories in a jiffy:

files = [os.path.join(dirpath, filename)
    for (dirpath, dirs, files) in os.walk('.')
    for filename in (dirs + files)]

You can turn this into a generator, to only process one path at a time and safe on memory.

Answered By: Martijn Pieters

Answer 5

You could also use the find program itself from Python by using sh

import sh
text_files = sh.find(".", "-iname", "*.txt")

Answered By: amoffat

Answer 6

pathlib.Path.rglob is pretty simple. It lists the entire directory tree

(The argument is a filepath search pattern. "*" means list everything)

import pathlib


for path in pathlib.Path("directory_to_list/").rglob("*"):
    print(path)

Answered By: Miłosz Łakomy

Answer 7

os.walk() is hard to use, just kick it and use pathlib instead.

Here is a python function mimicking a similar function of list.files in R language.

def list_files(path,pattern,full_names=False,recursive=True):
    if(recursive):
        files=pathlib.Path(path).rglob(pattern)
    else:
        files=pathlib.Path(path).glob(pattern)

    if full_names:
        files=[str(f) for f in files]
    else:
        files=[f.name for f in files]
    return(files)

Answered By: HuoJnx

Simplest way to get the equivalent of "find ." in python?

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