Question

Is there any way to make it so that IPython searches through your system path to find a file if only the name of the file is given?

I have a file foo_060112.dat that lives in a folder containing a lot of data files that are uniquely named in a folder in my path. I want to be able to simply call a load or open function on this file without specifying the full path—is it possible?

Answer 1

You can write your own function to search through the path and return an open file object according to the mode you select:

import sys
import os

def my_open(filename, mode):
    for path in sys.path:
        try:
            return open(os.path.join(path, filename), mode)
        except IOError:
            continue
    return None

Example: my_open('foo_060112.dat', 'rb')