How to copy a directory and its contents to an existing location using Python?

Question

I’m trying to copy a directory and all its contents to a path that already exists. The problem is, between the os module and the shutil module, there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this. the shutil.copytree() function expects that the destination path not exist beforehand.

The exact result I’m looking for is to copy an entire folder structure on top of another, overwriting silently on any duplicates found. Before I jump in and start writing my own function to do this I thought I’d ask if anyone knows of an existing recipe or snippet that does this.

Asked By: Soviut

||

Source

Answer 1

Why not implement it on your own using os.walk?

Answered By: Swaroop C H

Answer 2

distutils.dir_util.copy_tree does what you want.

Copy an entire directory tree src to a
new location dst. Both src and dst
must be directory names. If src is not
a directory, raise DistutilsFileError.
If dst does not exist, it is created
with mkpath(). The end result of the
copy is that every file in src is
copied to dst, and directories under
src are recursively copied to dst.
Return the list of files that were
copied or might have been copied,
using their output name. The return
value is unaffected by update or
dry_run: it is simply the list of all
files under src, with the names
changed to be under dst.

(more documentation at the above url)

Answered By: Ali Afshar

Answer 3

For highlevel file operations like that use the shutil module and in your case the copytree function. I think that is cleaner than “abusing” distutils.

UPDATE:: Forget the answer, I overlooked that the OP did try shutil.

Answered By: André

Answer 4

Are you gettting the error that says “Cannot create a directory when its already present”?
I am not sure how much silly is this, but all i did was to insert a single line into copytree module:
I changed :

def copytree(src, dst, symlinks=False):
    names = os.listdir(src)
    os.makedirs(dst)

into:

def copytree(src, dst, symlinks=False):
    names = os.listdir(src)
    if (os.path.isdir(dst)==False):
        os.makedirs(dst)

I guess i did some bluder. If so, could someone point me out that? Sorry, i am very new to python 😛

Answered By: jbpseudo

How to copy a directory and its contents to an existing location using Python?

Question:

Answers: