Question

In Java you can do File.listFiles() and receive all of the files in a directory. You can then easily recurse through directory trees.

Is there an analogous way to do this in Python?

Answer 1

Yes, there is. The Python way is even better.

There are three possibilities:

1) Like File.listFiles():

Python has the function os.listdir(path). It works like the Java method.

2) pathname pattern expansion with glob:

The module glob contains functions to list files on the file system using Unix shell like pattern, e.g.

 files = glob.glob('/usr/joe/*.gif') 

3) File Traversal with walk:

Really nice is the os.walk function of Python.

The walk method returns a generation function that recursively list all directories and files below a given starting path.

An Example:

 import os from os.path import join for root, dirs, files in os.walk('/usr'):    print 'Current directory', root    print 'Sub directories', dirs    print 'Files', files 

You can even on the fly remove directories from ‘dirs’ to avoid walking to that dir: if ‘joe’ in dirs: dirs.remove(‘joe’) to avoid walking into directories called ‘joe’.

listdir and walk are documented here. glob is documented here.