Power Of Walk

Os.path.walk is a fruitful system command in python. Using walk we can easily parse recursively through the folder.It gives the file names with in the folder and in the sub folders.  The syntax of walk is very simple. os.path.walk takes exactly three arguments. Syntax of os.path. walk is-

os.path.walk(parent_folder,function_call,pattern)

The first argument ‘parent_folder’ is the directory name that we need to parse. function_call is a function call that used to parse each folder and sub folder. It also takes three arguments. The third one pattern is actually a filtering parameter. We can give the extensions of file that we need to manipulate. If we need to get only mp3 files then we can give ‘*.mp3′ for pattern. Like we can give any extension. For getting all the files we can give ‘*.*’ for pattern.

Here am giving a small example to show the power of walk.

import sys
import shutil
import re
from fnmatch import fnmatch
import os, os.path

global destntn_dir
destntn_dir = None

def mp3_finder(pattern, dir, files):
 for filename in files:
  if fnmatch(filename, pattern):
   file_path =  os.path.join(dir, filename)
   #Copying files to destination folder
   shutil.copy(file_path,destntn_dir)

def main():

 ## Collect  command line arguments
 parent_folder = sys.argv[1]
 global destntn_dir
 destntn_dir = sys.argv[2]
 #Creating Destination Folder
 os.mkdir(destntn_dir)
 ## Walk folder
 os.path.walk(parent_folder,mp3_finder, '*.mp3')

if __name__=="__main__":
  main()

The above example copy all the mp3 files from the given folder and its sub folders to another folder. Here we are creating the destination folder inside the program.

Usage:
Run the program in the console using python command. We can give the source folder and destination folder as command line arguments. Please give the folder names along with their paths. Here the destination folder will create according to the path.