Question

Does Python have any built-in functionality to add a number to a filename if it already exists?

My idea is that it would work the way certain OS’s work – if a file is output to a directory where a file of that name already exists, it would append a number or increment it.

I.e: if “file.pdf” exists it will create “file2.pdf”, and next time “file3.pdf”.

Answer 1

In a way, Python has this functionality built into the tempfile module. Unfortunately, you have to tap into a private global variable, tempfile._name_sequence. This means that officially, tempfile makes no guarantee that in future versions _name_sequence even exists — it is an implementation detail.
But if you are okay with using it anyway, this shows how you can create uniquely named files of the form file#.pdf in a specified directory such as /tmp:

import tempfile
import itertools as IT
import os

def uniquify(path, sep = ''):
    def name_sequence():
        count = IT.count()
        yield ''
        while True:
            yield '{s}{n:d}'.format(s = sep, n = next(count))
    orig = tempfile._name_sequence 
    with tempfile._once_lock:
        tempfile._name_sequence = name_sequence()
        path = os.path.normpath(path)
        dirname, basename = os.path.split(path)
        filename, ext = os.path.splitext(basename)
        fd, filename = tempfile.mkstemp(dir = dirname, prefix = filename, suffix = ext)
        tempfile._name_sequence = orig
    return filename

print(uniquify('/tmp/file.pdf'))