Question

I want to be able to list only the directories inside some folder. This means I don’t want filenames listed, nor do I want additional sub-folders.

Let’s see if an example helps. In the current directory we have:

>>> os.listdir(os.getcwd()) ['cx_Oracle-doc', 'DLLs', 'Doc', 'include', 'Lib', 'libs', 'LICENSE.txt', 'mod_p ython-wininst.log', 'NEWS.txt', 'pymssql-wininst.log', 'python.exe', 'pythonw.ex e', 'README.txt', 'Removemod_python.exe', 'Removepymssql.exe', 'Scripts', 'tcl',  'Tools', 'w9xpopen.exe'] 

However, I don’t want filenames listed. Nor do I want sub-folders such as \Lib\curses. Essentially what I want works with the following:

>>> for root, dirnames, filenames in os.walk('.'): ...     print dirnames ...     break ... ['cx_Oracle-doc', 'DLLs', 'Doc', 'include', 'Lib', 'libs', 'Scripts', 'tcl', 'Tools'] 

However, I’m wondering if there’s a simpler way of achieving the same results. I get the impression that using os.walk only to return the top level is inefficient/too much.

Answer 1

Filter the result using os.path.isdir() (and use os.path.join() to get the real path):

>>> [ name for name in os.listdir(thedir) if os.path.isdir(os.path.join(thedir, name)) ] ['ctypes', 'distutils', 'encodings', 'lib-tk', 'config', 'idlelib', 'xml', 'bsddb', 'hotshot', 'logging', 'doc', 'test', 'compiler', 'curses', 'site-packages', 'email', 'sqlite3', 'lib-dynload', 'wsgiref', 'plat-linux2', 'plat-mac']