Question

I’m building a Python ISO generation app, and I’m getting some wierd output from os.path.isdir(). I’m running Arch Linux with Python 2.7.1.

I have the following folder structure:

/home/andrew/create_iso/Raw_Materials/
/home/andrew/create_iso/Raw_Materials/test_cd/

[andrew@Cydonia Raw_Materials]$ ls -l
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 3 andrew andrew 4096 Feb 23 10:20 test_cd

As you can see, test_cd/ is a normal Linux folder. However, when I run os.path.isdir(), I get different results depending on whether it’s part of my for loop or whether I hard code it.

import os
>>>for folders in os.listdir('/home/andrew/create_iso/Raw_Materials/'):
...  os.path.isdir(folders)
False

>>>os.path.isdir('/home/andrew/create_iso/Raw_Materials/test_cd')
True

I thought maybe there was something wierd in the output I’m getting from os.listdir(), but that also seems to check out:

>>>os.listdir('/home/andrew/create_iso/Raw_Materials/')
['test_cd']

Any idea why it’s treating these cases different? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

‘test_cd’ by itself is not a directory. You need to do an os.path.join to get the absolute path to the directory, and then call isdir on that.