Question

I have a directory, ‘Dst Directory’, which has files and folders in it and I have ‘src Directory’ which also has files and folders in it. What I want to do is move the contents of ‘src Directory’ to ‘Dst Directory’ and overwrite any files that exist with the same name. So for example ‘Src Directory\file.txt’ needs to be moved to ‘Dst Directory\’ and overwrite the existing file.txt. The same applies for some folders, moving a folder and merging the contents with the same folder in ‘dst directory’

I’m currently using shutil.move to move the contents of src to dst but it won’t do it if the files already exist and it won’t merge folders; it’ll just put the folder inside the existing folder.

Update: To make things a bit clearer, what I’m doing is unzipping an archive to the Dst Directory and then moving the contents of Src Directory there and rezipping, effectively updating files in the zip archive. This will be repeated for adding new files or new versions of files etc which is why it needs to overwrite and merge

Answer 1

Use copy() instead, which is willing to overwrite destination files. If you then want the first tree to go away, just rmtree() it separately once you are done iterating over it.

http://docs.python.org/library/shutil.html#shutil.copy

http://docs.python.org/library/shutil.html#shutil.rmtree

Update:

Do an os.walk() over the source tree. For each directory, check if it exists on the destination side, and os.makedirs() it if it is missing. For each file, simply shutil.copy() and the file will be created or overwritten, whichever is appropriate.