Question

I am fairly new to Python and I am trying to figure out the most efficient way to count the number of .TIF files in a particular sub-directory.

Doing some searching, I found one example (I have not tested), which claimed to count all of the files in a directory:

file_count = sum((len(f) for _, _, f in os.walk(myPath)))

This is fine, but I need to only count TIF files. My directory will contain other files types, but I only want to count TIFs.

Currently I am using the following code:

tifCounter = 0
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(myPath):
    for file in files:    
        if file.endswith('.tif'):
            tifCounter += 1

It works fine, but the looping seems to be excessive/expensive to me. Any way to do this more efficiently?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Something has to iterate over all files in the directory, and look at every single file name – whether that’s your code or a library routine. So no matter what the specific solution, they will all have roughly the same cost.

If you think it’s too much code, and if you don’t actually need to search subdirectories recursively, you can use the glob module:

import glob
tifCounter = len(glob.glob1(myPath,"*.tif"))