Question

I want to do something like this:

c:\data\> python myscript.py *.csv 

and pass all of the .csv files in the directory to my python script (such that sys.argv contains ['file1.csv', 'file2.csv'], etc.)

But sys.argv just receives ['*.csv'] indicating that the wildcard was not expanded, so this doesn’t work.

I feel like there is a simple way to do this, but can’t find it on Google. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can use the glob module, that way you won’t depend on the behavior of a particular shell (well, you still depend on the shell not expanding the arguments, but at least you can get this to happen in Unix by escaping the wildcards 🙂 ).

from glob import glob filelist = glob('*.csv') #You can pass the sys.argv argument