How to check if a directory contains files using Python 3

entities = os.listdir(dirpath)
for entity in entities:
    if os.path.isfile(entity):
        print(dirpath)
        break

You can make use of the new pathlib library introduced in Python 3.4 to extract all non-empty subdirectories recursively, eg:

import pathlib

root = pathlib.Path('some/path/here')
non_empty_dirs = {str(p.parent) for p in root.rglob('*') if p.is_file()}

Since you have to walk the tree anyway, we build a set of the parent directories where a file is present which results in a set of directories that contain files – then do as you wish with the result.

If you can delete the directory, you can use this:

my_path = os.path.abspath("something")               
try:
    os.rmdir(my_path)
    is_empty = True
    # Do you need to keep the directory? Recreate it!
    # os.makedirs(my_path, exist_ok=True)
except OSError:
    is_empty = False

if is_empty:
    pass

The os.rmdir only removes a directory if it is empty, otherwise it throws the OSError exception.

You can find a discussion about this on:

1. https://bytes.com/topic/python/answers/157394-how-determine-if-folder-empty

For example, deleting an empty directory is fine when you are planing to do a git clone, but not if you are checking beforehand whether the directory is empty, so your program does not throw an empty directory error.

You can use this simple code:

dir_contents = [x for x in os.listdir('.') if not x.startswith('.')]
if len(dir_contents) > 0:
    print("Directory contains files")

It checks for files and directories in the current working directory (.). You can change . in os.listdir() to check any other directory.

Adding to @Jon Clements’ pathlib answer, I wanted to check if the folder is empty with pathlib but without creating a set:

from pathlib import Path

# shorter version from @vogdb
is_empty = not any(Path('some/path/here').iterdir())

# similar but unnecessary complex
is_empty = not bool(sorted(Path('some/path/here').rglob('*')))

vogdb method attempts to iterate over all files in the given directory. If there is no files, any() will be False. We negate it with not so that is_empty is True if no files and False if files.

sorted(Path(path_here).rglob(‘*’)) return a list of sorted PosixPah items. If there is no items, it returns an empty list, which is False. So is_empty will be True if the path is empty and false if the path have something

Similar idea results {} and [] gives the same:

You can directly use the generator instead of converting to a set or (ordered) list first:

from pathlib import Path

p = Path('abc')

def check_dir(p):

    if not p.exists():
        print('This directory is non-existent')
        return

    try:
        next(p.rglob('*'))
    except StopIteration:
        print('This directory is empty')
        return

    print('OK')

Check if the folder contains files:

import os
import shutil

if len(os.listdir(folder_path)) == 0: # Check is empty..
    shutil.rmtree(folder_path) # Delete..

I have follews Bash checking if folder has contents answer.

os.walk('.') returns the complete files under a directory and if there thousands it may be inefficient. Instead following command find "$target" -mindepth 1 -print -quit returns first found file and quits. If it returns an empty string, which means folder is empty.

You can check if a directory is empty using find, and processing its
output

def is_dir_empty(absolute_path):
    cmd = ["find", absolute_path, "-mindepth", "1", "-print", "-quit"]
    output = subprocess.check_output(cmd).decode("utf-8").strip()
    return not output

print is_dir_empty("some/path/here")

With pathlib this can be done as follows:

import pathlib

# helper function
def is_empty(_dir: pathlib.Path) -> bool:
    # return not bool([_ for _ in _dir.iterdir()])
    return not any(_dir.iterdir())

# create empty dir
_dir = pathlib.Path("abc")

# check if dir empty
is_empty(_dir)  # will return True

# add files to folder and call it again

This can now be done more efficiently in Python3.5+, since there is no need to build a list of the directory contents just to see if its empty:

import os

def is_dir_empty(path):
    with os.scandir(path) as scan:
        return next(scan, None) is None

Note: as of Python 3.10, pathlib.Path.iterdir is using os.listdir internally, so it won’t perform so well on large directories compared to os.scandir.