Question

I’m trying to make a script to list all directories, subdirectories, and files in a given directory.

I tried this:

import sys, os

root = "/home/patate/directory/"
path = os.path.join(root, "targetdirectory")

for r, d, f in os.walk(path):
    for file in f:
        print(os.path.join(root, file))

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work properly. I get all the files, but not their complete paths.

For example, if the directory struct would be:

/home/patate/directory/targetdirectory/123/456/789/file.txt

It would print:

/home/patate/directory/targetdirectory/file.txt

I need the first result.

Answer 1

Use os.path.join to concatenate the directory and file name:

import os

for path, subdirs, files in os.walk(root):
    for name in files:
        print(os.path.join(path, name))

Note the usage of path and not root in the concatenation, since using root would be incorrect.

---

In Python 3.4, the pathlib module was added for easier path manipulations. So the equivalent to os.path.join would be:

pathlib.PurePath(path, name)

The advantage of pathlib is that you can use a variety of useful methods on paths. If you use the concrete Path variant you can also do actual OS calls through them, like changing into a directory, deleting the path, opening the file it points to and much more.