Question

I was looking to copy a whole directory and its files but also printing each file name that its being copied.

I was using a simply call to cp -rf dir dest with os.system but I cant print each filename separately as obvious.

I then thought about listing eash directory file by calling recursively ls with os.system, saving the whole string, split them on an array, and implement a for loop to run os.system(“cp ” file1 + ” des/”) and printing the filename, but it looks like lot of work.

Any better ideas to accomplish this?

Answer 1

You can use os.walk to get the entire directory listing and use that listing to copy all files iteratively. Something like

file_paths = [os.path.join(root, f) for root, _, files in os.walk('.') for f in files]
for path in file_paths:
    print path
    shutil.copy(path, target)

Alternatively according to MatthewFranglen‘s comment you can just do shutil.copytree(src, dst). That will also allow you to ignore things but you’ll need to define a function to do that instead of using an if in the list comprehension.

# ignore all .DS_Store and *.txt files
file_paths = [os.path.join(root, f) for root, _, files in os.walk('.') for f in files if (f != '.DS_Store') or f.endswith('.txt'))]

compared to

from shutil import copytree, ignore_patterns
ignore_func = ignore_patterns('.DS_Store', '*.txt')  # ignore .DS_Store and *.txt files
copytree('/path/to/dir/', '/other/dir', ignore=ignore_func)