Question

I’m want a function to return a list with directories with a specified path and a fixed depth and soon realized there a few alternatives. I’m using os.walk quite a lot but the code started to look ugly when counting the depth etc.

What is really the most “neat” implementation?

Answer 1

If the depth is fixed, glob is a good idea:

import glob,os.path
filesDepth3 = glob.glob('*/*/*')
dirsDepth3 = filter(lambda f: os.path.isdir(f), filesDepth3)

Otherwise, it shouldn’t be too hard to use os.walk:

import os,string
path = '.'
path = os.path.normpath(path)
res = []
for root,dirs,files in os.walk(path, topdown=True):
    depth = root[len(path) + len(os.path.sep):].count(os.path.sep)
    if depth == 2:
        # We're currently two directories in, so all subdirs have depth 3
        res += [os.path.join(root, d) for d in dirs]
        dirs[:] = [] # Don't recurse any deeper
print(res)