Question

I’ve recently started learning python and am having some trouble. The functions in question attempt to start at a given directorty, in my case, ‘/home/jesse/ostest’, search through all of the sub-directories, and copy all ‘.txt’ files to ‘/home/jesse/COPIES’. When I run the program, a few files get coppied but it gets stuck in an infinite loop. I’d like it to break when it changes to ‘/home/jesse’ (10th line of search()). Maybe I’m not understanding recursion that well but help is appreciated.

Here is a test directory, with subdirectries to test the program.

[jesse@jesse ostest]$ tree
.
├── readme.txt
├── README_WxPython.txt
├── rect.txt
├── RELEASE_NOTES.txt
├── scrap.txt
├── sndarray.txt
├── sprite.txt
├── surface.txt
├── surfarray.txt
├── test_oo.txt
├── tests.txt
├── this
│   ├── gme_notes.txt
│   ├── gme_readme.txt
│   ├── h1.txt
│   ├── h2.txt
│   ├── how_to_build.txt
│   ├── howto_release_pygame.txt
│   ├── image.txt
│   ├── IMPORTANT_MOVED.txt
│   ├── index.txt
│   ├── install.txt
│   ├── is
│   │   ├── a
│   │   │   ├── color.txt
│   │   │   ├── common.txt
│   │   │   ├── cursors.txt
│   │   │   ├── dec.txt
│   │   │   ├── defs.txt
│   │   │   └── display.txt
│   │   ├── event.txt
│   │   ├── examples.txt
│   │   ├── filepaths.txt
│   │   ├── font.txt
│   │   ├── freetype.txt
│   │   ├── gfxdraw.txt
│   │   ├── gme_design.txt
│   │   └── path
│   │       ├── api.txt
│   │       ├── auth.txt
│   │       ├── camera.txt
│   │       ├── cdrom.txt
│   │       ├── cert_override.txt
│   │       ├── changes_for_symbian.txt
│   │       └── CHANGES.txt
│   └── joystick.txt
├── time.txt
├── TODO.txt
└── transform.txt

4 directories, 45 files

Here is the code:

def copyAll():
    print('This function attempts to search through /home/jesse/ostest and copy all .txt files.')
    input('Press <enter> to begin..')
    new = '/home/jesse/COPIES'
    os.mkdir(new)
    done = []
    search('/home/jesse/ostest', new, done)
    print(os.getcwd())
    print(os.listdir())

def search(arg, new, done):
    os.chdir(arg)
    print(os.getcwd())
    for var in os.listdir():
        if os.path.isdir(var) and var not in done:
            search(var, new, done)
        elif var[-4:] == '.txt' and var not in done:
            shutil.copy2(var, '/home/jesse/COPIES')
            print('COPIED', var, '\t\tto', new)
        elif os.getcwd() == '/home/jesse':
            break
        else:
            done += os.getcwd()
            os.chdir('..')
            search(os.getcwd(), new, done)

Answer 1

Start by taking a look at os.walk():

http://docs.python.org/2/library/os.html#os.walk