Question

[Edit: see below for final code] I have the following code and I’m trying to figure out where to insert the random.choice code to make it select a single file, copy it, and repeat (here 6 times).

import os
import shutil
import random

dir_input = str(input("Enter Source Directory: "))
src_files = (os.listdir(dir_input))

for x in range (0,5):
    print ('This is the %d time' % x)
    for file_name in src_files:
        full_file_name = (os.path.join(dir_input, file_name))
        if (os.path.isfile(full_file_name)):
        print ('copying...' + full_file_name)
            shutil.copy(full_file_name, r'C:\Dir'))
else:
    print ('Finished!')

Answer 1

Thanks everyone for your help. The code changed significantly as I learned some things (and got help from people on this forum). The people on this site are quite awesome. Here’s the code:

import os
import shutil
import random
import os.path

src_dir = 'C:\\'
target_dir = 'C:\\TEST'
src_files = (os.listdir(src_dir))
def valid_path(dir_path, filename):
    full_path = os.path.join(dir_path, filename)
    return os.path.isfile(full_path)  
files = [os.path.join(src_dir, f) for f in src_files if valid_path(src_dir, f)]
choices = random.sample(files, 5)
for files in choices:
    shutil.copy(files, target_dir)
print ('Finished!')