Question

I’m trying to get a homemade path navigation function working – basically I need to go through one folder, and explore every folder within it, running a function within each folder.

I reach a problem when I try to change directories within a for loop. I’ve got this “findDirectories” function:

def findDirectories(list):
    for files in os.listdir("."):
        print (files)
        list.append(files)
        os.chdir("y")

That last line causes the problems. If I remove it, the function just compiles a list with all the folders in that folder. Unfortunately, this means I have to run this each time I go down a folder, I can’t just run the whole thing once. I’ve specified the folder “y” as that’s a real folder, but the program crashes upon opening even with that. Doing os.chdir(“y”) outside of the for loop has no issues at all.

I’m new to Python, but not to programming in general. How can I get this to work, or is there a better way? The final result I need is running a Function on each single “*Response.xml” file that exists within this folder, no matter how deeply nested it is.

Answer 1

As Dan said, os.walk would be better. See the example there.