Question

I have such dir tree:

dir1
 - dir2
 - dir3
 - file1.java
 - file2.java
 - file3.cpp

and I want to move only *.java files to brand new directory called ‘java_files’ in current directory. How to make it? I read shutil doc but …

This:

def moveFiles() :
    source = "."
    destination = "java_files"
    if os.path.isfile(source):
        shutil.move(source, destination)

doesn’t work at all …

I don’t want to use shells ‘mv’ instead !

EDIT:

I also tried this:

def moveFiles() :
    source = "."
    destination = "java_files"
    dirList = os.listdir(source)
    for fname in  dirList:
        if fname.endswith(".java") :
            shutil.move(source, destination)

but it gives:

File "test.py", line 95, in <module>
 main()   File "test.py", line 91, in main
 moveFils()   File "test.py", line 82, in move
 shutil.move(source, destination)   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/shutil.py", line 295, in move
 raise Error, "Cannot move a directory '%s' into itself '%s'." % (src, dst) shutil.Error:Cannot move a directory '.' into itself 'java_files'.

Answer 1

In this kind of cases, I use glob (which accepts wildcards and regular expressions)

#!/usr/bin/env python

import glob
import shutil
import os

source="."
destination = "/tmp/newDestination/"

if not(os.path.exists(destination)):
    os.makedirs(destination)
elif not(os.path.isdir(destination)):
    raise OSError("Kabooom! The destination %s exists, but is not a directory" % destination)

for javaFile in glob.glob(os.path.join(source, "*.java")):
    if os.path.isfile(javaFile):
        shutil.move(os.path.abspath(javaFile), destination)