I have a C++/Obj-C background and I am just discovering Python (been writing it for about an hour). I am writing a script to recursively read the contents of text files in a folder structure.

The problem I have is the code I have written will only work for one folder deep. I can see why in the code (see #hardcoded path), I just don’t know how I can move forward with Python since my experience with it is only brand new.

Python Code:

import os
import sys

rootdir = sys.argv[1]

for root, subFolders, files in os.walk(rootdir):

    for folder in subFolders:
        outfileName = rootdir + "/" + folder + "/py-outfile.txt" # hardcoded path
        folderOut = open( outfileName, 'w' )
        print "outfileName is " + outfileName

        for file in files:
            filePath = rootdir + '/' + file
            f = open( filePath, 'r' )
            toWrite = f.read()
            print "Writing '" + toWrite + "' to" + filePath
            folderOut.write( toWrite )
            f.close()

        folderOut.close()

Make sure you understand the three return values of os.walk:

for root, subdirs, files in os.walk(rootdir):

has the following meaning:

• root: Current path which is “walked through”
• subdirs: Files in root of type directory
• files: Files in root (not in subdirs) of type other than directory

And please use os.path.join instead of concatenating with a slash! Your problem is filePath = rootdir + '/' + file – you must concatenate the currently “walked” folder instead of the topmost folder. So that must be filePath = os.path.join(root, file). BTW “file” is a builtin, so you don’t normally use it as variable name.

Another problem are your loops, which should be like this, for example:

import os
import sys

walk_dir = sys.argv[1]

print('walk_dir = ' + walk_dir)

# If your current working directory may change during script execution, it's recommended to
# immediately convert program arguments to an absolute path. Then the variable root below will
# be an absolute path as well. Example:
# walk_dir = os.path.abspath(walk_dir)
print('walk_dir (absolute) = ' + os.path.abspath(walk_dir))

for root, subdirs, files in os.walk(walk_dir):
    print('--\nroot = ' + root)
    list_file_path = os.path.join(root, 'my-directory-list.txt')
    print('list_file_path = ' + list_file_path)

    with open(list_file_path, 'wb') as list_file:
        for subdir in subdirs:
            print('\t- subdirectory ' + subdir)

        for filename in files:
            file_path = os.path.join(root, filename)

            print('\t- file %s (full path: %s)' % (filename, file_path))

            with open(file_path, 'rb') as f:
                f_content = f.read()
                list_file.write(('The file %s contains:\n' % filename).encode('utf-8'))
                list_file.write(f_content)
                list_file.write(b'\n')

If you didn’t know, the with statement for files is a shorthand:

with open('filename', 'rb') as f:
    dosomething()

# is effectively the same as

f = open('filename', 'rb')
try:
    dosomething()
finally:
    f.close()

If you are using Python 3.5 or above, you can get this done in 1 line.

import glob

# root_dir needs a trailing slash (i.e. /root/dir/)
for filename in glob.iglob(root_dir + '**/*.txt', recursive=True):
     print(filename)

As mentioned in the documentation

If recursive is true, the pattern ‘**’ will match any files and zero or more directories and subdirectories.

If you want every file, you can use

import glob

for filename in glob.iglob(root_dir + '**/**', recursive=True):
     print(filename)

Agree with Dave Webb, os.walk will yield an item for each directory in the tree. Fact is, you just don’t have to care about subFolders.

Code like this should work:

import os
import sys

rootdir = sys.argv[1]

for folder, subs, files in os.walk(rootdir):
    with open(os.path.join(folder, 'python-outfile.txt'), 'w') as dest:
        for filename in files:
            with open(os.path.join(folder, filename), 'r') as src:
                dest.write(src.read())

TL;DR: This is the equivalent to find -type f to go over all files in all folders below and including the current one:

for currentpath, folders, files in os.walk('.'):
    for file in files:
        print(os.path.join(currentpath, file))

As already mentioned in other answers, os.walk() is the answer, but it could be explained better. It’s quite simple! Let’s walk through this tree:

docs/
└── doc1.odt
pics/
todo.txt

With this code:

for currentpath, folders, files in os.walk('.'):
    print(currentpath)

The currentpath is the current folder it is looking at. This will output:

.
./docs
./pics

So it loops three times, because there are three folders: the current one, docs, and pics. In every loop, it fills the variables folders and files with all folders and files. Let’s show them:

for currentpath, folders, files in os.walk('.'):
    print(currentpath, folders, files)

This shows us:

# currentpath  folders           files
.              ['pics', 'docs']  ['todo.txt']
./pics         []                []
./docs         []                ['doc1.odt']

So in the first line, we see that we are in folder ., that it contains two folders namely pics and docs, and that there is one file, namely todo.txt. You don’t have to do anything to recurse into those folders, because as you see, it recurses automatically and just gives you the files in any subfolders. And any subfolders of that (though we don’t have those in the example).

If you just want to loop through all files, the equivalent of find -type f, you can do this:

for currentpath, folders, files in os.walk('.'):
    for file in files:
        print(os.path.join(currentpath, file))

This outputs:

./todo.txt
./docs/doc1.odt

The pathlib library is really great for working with files. You can do a recursive glob on a Path object like so.

from pathlib import Path

for elem in Path('/path/to/my/files').rglob('*.*'):
    print(elem)

If you want a flat list of all paths under a given dir (like find . in the shell):

   files = [ 
       os.path.join(parent, name)
       for (parent, subdirs, files) in os.walk(YOUR_DIRECTORY)
       for name in files + subdirs
   ]

To only include full paths to files under the base dir, leave out + subdirs.

import glob
import os

root_dir = <root_dir_here>

for filename in glob.iglob(root_dir + '**/**', recursive=True):
    if os.path.isfile(filename):
        with open(filename,'r') as file:
            print(file.read())

**/** is used to get all files recursively including directory.

if os.path.isfile(filename) is used to check if filename variable is file or directory, if it is file then we can read that file. Here I am printing file.

I’ve found the following to be the easiest

from glob import glob
import os

files = [f for f in glob('rootdir/**', recursive=True) if os.path.isfile(f)]

Using glob('some/path/**', recursive=True) gets all files, but also includes directory names. Adding the if os.path.isfile(f) condition filters this list to existing files only

use os.path.join() to construct your paths – It’s neater:

import os
import sys
rootdir = sys.argv[1]
for root, subFolders, files in os.walk(rootdir):
    for folder in subFolders:
        outfileName = os.path.join(root,folder,"py-outfile.txt")
        folderOut = open( outfileName, 'w' )
        print "outfileName is " + outfileName
        for file in files:
            filePath = os.path.join(root,file)
            toWrite = open( filePath).read()
            print "Writing '" + toWrite + "' to" + filePath
            folderOut.write( toWrite )
        folderOut.close()

os.walk does recursive walk by default. For each dir, starting from root it yields a 3-tuple (dirpath, dirnames, filenames)

from os import walk
from os.path import splitext, join

def select_files(root, files):
    """
    simple logic here to filter out interesting files
    .py files in this example
    """

    selected_files = []

    for file in files:
        #do concatenation here to get full path 
        full_path = join(root, file)
        ext = splitext(file)[1]

        if ext == ".py":
            selected_files.append(full_path)

    return selected_files

def build_recursive_dir_tree(path):
    """
    path    -    where to begin folder scan
    """
    selected_files = []

    for root, dirs, files in walk(path):
        selected_files += select_files(root, files)

    return selected_files

Try this:

import os
import sys

for root, subdirs, files in os.walk(path):

    for file in os.listdir(root):

        filePath = os.path.join(root, file)

        if os.path.isdir(filePath):
            pass

        else:
            f = open (filePath, 'r')
            # Do Stuff

I think the problem is that you’re not processing the output of os.walk correctly.

Firstly, change:

filePath = rootdir + '/' + file

to:

filePath = root + '/' + file

rootdir is your fixed starting directory; root is a directory returned by os.walk.

Secondly, you don’t need to indent your file processing loop, as it makes no sense to run this for each subdirectory. You’ll get root set to each subdirectory. You don’t need to process the subdirectories by hand unless you want to do something with the directories themselves.