Question

I have a piece of code which I’m using to search for the executables of game files and returning the directories. I would really like to get some sort of progress indicator as to how far along os.walk is. How would I accomplish such a thing?

I tried doing startpt = root.count(os.sep) and gauging off of that but that just gives how deep os.walk is in a directory tree.

def locate(filelist, root=os.curdir): #Find a list of files, return directories.
    for path, dirs, files in os.walk(os.path.abspath(root)):
        for filename in returnMatches(filelist, [k.lower() for k in files]):
            yield path + "\\"

Answer 1

I figured this out.

I used os.listdir to get a list of toplevel directories, and then used the .split function on the path that os.walk returned, returning the first level directory that it was currently in.

That left me with a list of toplevel directories, which I could find the index of the current directory of os.walk, and compare the index returned with the length of the list, giving me a % complete. 😉

This doesn’t give me a smooth progress, because the level of work done in each directory can vary but smoothing out the progress indicator is of no concern for me. But it could easily be accomplished by extending the path checking deeper into the directory structure.

Here is the final code from getting my progress:

def locateGameDirs(filelist, root=os.curdir): #Find a list of files, return directories.
    toplevel = [folder for folder in os.listdir(root) if os.path.isdir(os.path.join(root, folder))] #List of top-level directories
    fileset = set(filelist)

    for path, dirs, files in os.walk(os.path.abspath(root)):

        curdir = path.split('\\')[1] #The directory os.walk is currently in.

        try: #Thrown here because there's a nonexistant(?) first entry.
            youarehere = toplevel.index(curdir)
            progress = int(((youarehere)/len(toplevel))*100)
        except:
            pass

        for filename in returnMatches(filelist, [k.lower() for k in files]):
            yield filename, path + "\\", progress

And right now for debugging purposes I’m doing this further in the code:

    for wow in locateGameDirs(["wow.exe", "firefox.exe", "vlc.exe"], "C:\\"):
    print wow

Is there a nice little way to get rid of that try/except?; it seems the first iteration of path gives me nothing…