Question

I’ve gave it a decent attempt based on other answers I’ve found but haven’t managed anything solid (my solution is horrifically slow but maybe there’s no other way). Basically, I have a folder called “scratch” where users can create there own folders to dump their data.
I need my script to find out which user’s folders haven’t been used for over 30 days. I figured I could do this by finding the most recently modified directory in the users folder (by searching it recursively) then filter out ones older.

Code to get a list of users directories:

    dirlist = list()
    for filename in os.listdir("\\\\abg-netapp1\\Scratch\\"):
        dirlist.append(filename)

Then I can iterate over each index of ‘dirlist’ to create a full path to search:

    x=0
    for item in dirlist:
        max_mtime = 0
        for dirname,subdirs,files in os.walk("\\\\abg-netapp1\\Scratch\\" + dirlist[x]):
            for fname in subdirs:
                full_path = os.path.join(dirname, fname)
                mtime = os.stat(full_path).st_mtime
                if mtime > max_mtime:
                    max_mtime = mtime
                    max_dir = dirname
                    max_file = fname
        print max_dir, max_file, time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d', time.localtime(max_mtime))
        x+=1

I do know I haven’t gone about filtering out directories older than 30 days yet, just wanted to see if there was anything I could change with this code.
Am I going about this the wrong way, is there an easier solution to this? Any questions or whatever then let me know, thanks!

Answer 1

I would use:

import os
from os.path import join
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from operator import itemgetter


def list_user_files(username):
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(username):
        for name in files:
            fullname = join(root, name)
            try:
                yield fullname, os.stat(fullname).st_mtime
            except (IOError, OSError) as e: # will catch WindowsError but more generic
                pass # Do something here...


ROOT = '/home'
CUTOFF = timedelta(days=30)
for userdir in os.listdir(ROOT):
    most_recent = max(list_user_files(join(ROOT, userdir)), key=itemgetter(1))
    print '{}: most recent file and timestamp is {}'.format(userdir, most_recent)
    if (datetime.now() - datetime.fromtimestamp(most_recent[1])) > CUTOFF:
        print '{} has not used their folder during cutoff period'.format(userdir)

Debugging max ValueError (put this in place of most_recent= line):

try:
    most_recent = max(list_user_files(join(ROOT, userdir)), key=itemgetter(1))
except ValueError as e:
    print '***DEBUG***', list(list_user_files(join(ROOT, userdir)))