Question

Why is this recursive function returning more than 1 dictionary aka printing them each time it cycles why isn’t it adding new findings to the existing dictionary.

And no i dont want to use os.walk and yes i am aware theres no return

def retFiles(dir):
    data = {}
    root = set()
    os.chdir(dir)
    cwd = os.getcwd()
    for i in os.listdir(cwd):
        if os.path.isfile(i):
            data.setdefault(i, set())
            root.add(os.path.relpath(dir).replace("\\", "/"))
            data[i] = root
        else:
            retFiles(i)
    print(data)

Answer 1

Either pass your dictionnary as a parameter to keep the reference to the same dictionary, or use return to use the dictionary resulting of the previous call.

Either ways, your recursive function, as all recursive calls, need to work on the same data, otherwise it’s useless.