Question

I am attempting to write a simple script to recursively rip through a directory and check if any of the files have been changed. I only have the traversal so far:

import fnmatch
import os 
from optparse import OptionParser

rootPath = os.getcwd() 
pattern = '*.js' 

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(rootPath):    
    for filename in files:        
        print( os.path.join(root, filename))

I have two issues:

1. How do I tell if a file has been modified?

2. How can I check if a directory has been modified? – I need to do this because the folder I wish to traverse is huge. If I can check if the dir has been modified and not recursively rip through an unchanged dir, this would greatly help.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you are comparing two files between two folders, you can use os.path.getmtime() on both files and compare the results. If they’re the same, they haven’t been modified. Note that this will work on both files and folders.