We have been reading data from files, networks, services, and databases. Python can also go through all of the directories and folders on your computers and read those files as well.
In this chapter, we will write programs that scan through your computer and perform some operation on each file. Files are organized into directories (also called “folders”). Simple Python scripts can make short work of simple tasks that must be done to hundreds or thousands of files spread across a directory tree or your entire computer.
To walk through all the directories and files in a tree we use os.walk and a for loop. This is similar to how open allows us to write a loop to read the contents of a file, socket allows us to write a loop to read the contents of a network connection, and urllib allows us to open a web document and loop through its contents.
Every running program has a “current directory,” which is the default directory for most operations. For example, when you open a file for reading, Python looks for it in the current directory.
The os module provides functions for working with files and directories (os stands for “operating system”). os.getcwd returns the name of the current directory:
>>> import os
>>> cwd = os.getcwd()
>>> print cwd
/Users/csev
cwd stands for current working directory. The result in this example is /Users/csev, which is the home directory of a user named csev.
A string like cwd that identifies a file is called a path. A relative path starts from the current directory; an absolute path starts from the topmost directory in the file system.
The paths we have seen so far are simple file names, so they are relative to the current directory. To find the absolute path to a file, you can use os.path.abspath:
>>> os.path.abspath('memo.txt')
'/Users/csev/memo.txt'
os.path.exists checks whether a file or directory exists:
>>> os.path.exists('memo.txt')
True
If it exists, os.path.isdir checks whether it’s a directory:
>>> os.path.isdir('memo.txt')
False
>>> os.path.isdir('music')
True
Similarly, os.path.isfile checks whether it’s a file.
os.listdir returns a list of the files (and other directories) in the given directory:
>>> os.listdir(cwd)
['music', 'photos', 'memo.txt']
Some time ago, I built a bit of Flickr-like software that received photos from my cell phone and stored those photos on my server. I wrote this before Flickr existed and kept using it after Flickr existed because I wanted to keep original copies of my images forever.
I would also send a simple one-line text description in the MMS message or the subject line of the email message. I stored these messages in a text file in the same directory as the image file. I came up with a directory structure based on the month, year, day, and time the photo was taken. The following would be an example of the naming for one photo and its existing description:
./2006/03/24-03-06_2018002.jpg
./2006/03/24-03-06_2018002.txt
After seven years, I had a lot of photos and captions. Over the years as I switched cell phones, sometimes my code to extract the caption from the message would break and add a bunch of useless data on my server instead of a caption.
I wanted to go through these files and figure out which of the text files were really captions and which were junk and then delete the bad files. The first thing to do was to get a simple inventory of how many text files I had in one the subfolders using the following program:
import os
count = 0
for (dirname, dirs, files) in os.walk('.'):
for filename in files:
if filename.endswith('.txt') :
count = count + 1
print 'Files:', count
python txtcount.py
Files: 1917
The key bit of code that makes this possible is the os.walk library in Python. When we call os.walk and give it a starting directory, it will “walk” through all of the directories and subdirectories recursively. The string “.” indicates to start in the current directory and walk downward. As it encounters each directory, we get three values in a tuple in the body of the for loop. The first value is the current directory name, the second value is the list of subdirectories in the current directory, and the third value is a list of files in the current directory.
We do not have to explicitly look into each of the subdirectories because we can count on os.walk to visit every folder eventually. But we do want to look at each file, so we write a simple for loop to examine each of the files in the current directory. We check each file to see if it ends with “.txt” and then count the number of files through the whole directory tree that end with the suffix “.txt”.
Once we have a sense of how many files end with “.txt”, the next thing to do is try to automatically determine in Python which files are bad and which files are good. So we write a simple program to print out the files and the size of each file:
import os
from os.path import join
for (dirname, dirs, files) in os.walk('.'):
for filename in files:
if filename.endswith('.txt') :
thefile = os.path.join(dirname,filename)
print os.path.getsize(thefile), thefile
Now instead of just counting the files, we create
a file name by concatenating the directory name with
the name of the file within the directory using
os.path.join. It is important to use
os.path.join instead of string concatenation
because on Windows we use a backslash
(\) to construct file paths and on Linux
or Apple we use a forward slash (/)
to construct file paths. The os.path.join
knows these differences and knows what system
we are running on and it does the proper concatenation
depending on the system. So the same Python code
runs on either Windows or Unix-style systems.
Once we have the full file name with directory path, we use the os.path.getsize utility to get the size and print it out, producing the following output:
python txtsize.py
...
18 ./2006/03/24-03-06_2303002.txt
22 ./2006/03/25-03-06_1340001.txt
22 ./2006/03/25-03-06_2034001.txt
...
2565 ./2005/09/28-09-05_1043004.txt
2565 ./2005/09/28-09-05_1141002.txt
...
2578 ./2006/03/27-03-06_1618001.txt
2578 ./2006/03/28-03-06_2109001.txt
2578 ./2006/03/29-03-06_1355001.txt
...
Scanning the output, we notice that some files are pretty short and a lot of the files are pretty large and the same size (2578 and 2565). When we take a look at a few of these larger files by hand, it looks like the large files are nothing but a generic bit of identical HTML that came in from mail sent to my system from my T-Mobile phone:
<html>
<head>
<title>T-Mobile</title>
...
Skimming through the file, it looks like there is no good information in these files so we can probably delete them.
But before we delete the files, we will write a program to look for files that are more than one line long and show the contents of the file. We will not bother showing ourselves those files that are exactly 2578 or 2565 characters long since we know that these files have no useful information.
So we write the following program:
import os
from os.path import join
for (dirname, dirs, files) in os.walk('.'):
for filename in files:
if filename.endswith('.txt') :
thefile = os.path.join(dirname,filename)
size = os.path.getsize(thefile)
if size == 2578 or size == 2565:
continue
fhand = open(thefile,'r')
lines = list()
for line in fhand:
lines.append(line)
fhand.close()
if len(lines) > 1:
print len(lines), thefile
print lines[:4]
We use a continue to skip files with the two “bad sizes”, then open the rest of the files and read the lines of the file into a Python list and if the file has more than one line we print out how many lines are in the file and print out the first three lines.
It looks like filtering out those two bad file sizes, and assuming that all one-line files are correct, we are down to some pretty clean data:
python txtcheck.py
3 ./2004/03/22-03-04_2015.txt
['Little horse rider\r\n', '\r\n', '\r']
2 ./2004/11/30-11-04_1834001.txt
['Testing 123.\n', '\n']
3 ./2007/09/15-09-07_074202_03.txt
['\r\n', '\r\n', 'Sent from my iPhone\r\n']
3 ./2007/09/19-09-07_124857_01.txt
['\r\n', '\r\n', 'Sent from my iPhone\r\n']
3 ./2007/09/20-09-07_115617_01.txt
...
But there is one more annoying pattern of files: there are some three-line files that consist of two blank lines followed by a line that says “Sent from my iPhone” that have slipped into my data. So we make the following change to the program to deal with these files as well.
lines = list()
for line in fhand:
lines.append(line)
if len(lines) == 3 and lines[2].startswith('Sent from my iPhone'):
continue
if len(lines) > 1:
print len(lines), thefile
print lines[:4]
We simply check if we have a three-line file, and if the third line starts with the specified text, we skip it.
Now when we run the program, we only see four remaining multi-line files and all of those files look pretty reasonable:
python txtcheck2.py
3 ./2004/03/22-03-04_2015.txt
['Little horse rider\r\n', '\r\n', '\r']
2 ./2004/11/30-11-04_1834001.txt
['Testing 123.\n', '\n']
2 ./2006/03/17-03-06_1806001.txt
['On the road again...\r\n', '\r\n']
2 ./2006/03/24-03-06_1740001.txt
['On the road again...\r\n', '\r\n']
If you look at the overall pattern of this program, we have successively refined how we accept or reject files and once we found a pattern that was “bad” we used continue to skip the bad files so we could refine our code to find more file patterns that were bad.
Now we are getting ready to delete the files, so we are going to flip the logic and instead of printing out the remaining good files, we will print out the “bad” files that we are about to delete.
import os
from os.path import join
for (dirname, dirs, files) in os.walk('.'):
for filename in files:
if filename.endswith('.txt') :
thefile = os.path.join(dirname,filename)
size = os.path.getsize(thefile)
if size == 2578 or size == 2565:
print 'T-Mobile:',thefile
continue
fhand = open(thefile,'r')
lines = list()
for line in fhand:
lines.append(line)
fhand.close()
if len(lines) == 3 and lines[2].startswith('Sent from my iPhone'):
print 'iPhone:', thefile
continue
We can now see a list of candidate files that we are about to delete and why these files are up for deleting. The program produces the following output:
python txtcheck3.py
...
T-Mobile: ./2006/05/31-05-06_1540001.txt
T-Mobile: ./2006/05/31-05-06_1648001.txt
iPhone: ./2007/09/15-09-07_074202_03.txt
iPhone: ./2007/09/15-09-07_144641_01.txt
iPhone: ./2007/09/19-09-07_124857_01.txt
...
We can spot-check these files to make sure that we did not inadvertently end up introducing a bug in our program or perhaps our logic caught some files we did not want to catch.
Once we are satisfied that this is the list of files we want to delete, we make the following change to the program:
if size == 2578 or size == 2565:
print 'T-Mobile:',thefile
os.remove(thefile)
continue
...
if len(lines) == 3 and lines[2].startswith('Sent from my iPhone'):
print 'iPhone:', thefile
os.remove(thefile)
continue
In this version of the program, we will both print the file out and remove the bad files using os.remove.
python txtdelete.py
T-Mobile: ./2005/01/02-01-05_1356001.txt
T-Mobile: ./2005/01/02-01-05_1858001.txt
...
Just for fun, run the program a second time and it will produce no output since the bad files are already gone.
If we rerun txtcount.py we can see that we have removed 899 bad files:
python txtcount.py
Files: 1018
In this section, we have followed a sequence where we use Python to first look through directories and files seeking patterns. We slowly use Python to help determine what we want to do to clean up our directories. Once we figure out which files are good and which files are not useful, we use Python to delete the files and perform the cleanup.
The problem you may need to solve can either be quite simple and might only depend on looking at the names of files, or perhaps you need to read every single file and look for patterns within the files. Sometimes you will need to read all the files and make a change to some of the files. All of these are pretty straightforward once you understand how os.walk and the other os utilities can be used.
In earlier chapters, we had a number of programs that prompted
for a file name using raw_input and then read data
from the file and processed the data as follows:
name = raw_input('Enter file:')
handle = open(name, 'r')
text = handle.read()
...
We can simplify this program a bit by taking the file name from the command line when we start Python. Up to now, we simply run our Python programs and respond to the prompts as follows:
python words.py
Enter file: mbox-short.txt
...
We can place additional strings after the Python file and access those command-line arguments in our Python program. Here is a simple program that demonstrates reading arguments from the command line:
import sys
print 'Count:', len(sys.argv)
print 'Type:', type(sys.argv)
for arg in sys.argv:
print 'Argument:', arg
The contents of sys.argv are a list of strings where the first string is the name of the Python program and the remaining strings are the arguments on the command line after the Python file.
The following shows our program reading several command-line arguments from the command line:
python argtest.py hello there
Count: 3
Type: <type 'list'>
Argument: argtest.py
Argument: hello
Argument: there
There are three arguments are passed into our program as a three-element list. The first element of the list is the file name (argtest.py) and the others are the two command-line arguments after the file name.
We can rewrite our program to read the file, taking the file name from the command-line argument as follows:
import sys
name = sys.argv[1]
handle = open(name, 'r')
text = handle.read()
print name, 'is', len(text), 'bytes'
We take the second command-line argument as the name of the file (skipping past the program name in the [0] entry). We open the file and read the contents as follows:
python argfile.py mbox-short.txt
mbox-short.txt is 94626 bytes
Using command-line arguments as input can make it easier to reuse your Python programs, especially when you only need to input one or two strings.
Most operating systems provide a command-line interface, also known as a shell. Shells usually provide commands to navigate the file system and launch applications. For example, in Unix, you can change directories with cd, display the contents of a directory with ls, and launch a web browser by typing (for example) firefox.
Any program that you can launch from the shell can also be launched from Python using a pipe. A pipe is an object that represents a running process.
For example, the Unix command1 ls -l normally displays the contents of the current directory (in long format). You can launch ls with os.popen:
>>> cmd = 'ls -l'
>>> fp = os.popen(cmd)
The argument is a string that contains a shell command. The return value is a file pointer that behaves just like an open file. You can read the output from the ls process one line at a time with readline or get the whole thing at once with read:
>>> res = fp.read()
When you are done, you close the pipe like a file:
>>> stat = fp.close()
>>> print stat
None
The return value is the final status of the ls process; None means that it ended normally (with no errors).
In a large collection of MP3 files there may be more than one copy of the same song, stored in different directories or with different file names. The goal of this exercise is to search for these duplicates.
You can read about MD5 at wikipedia.org/wiki/Md5. The following code snippet opens a file, reads it, and computes its checksum.
import hashlib
...
fhand = open(thefile,'r')
data = fhand.read()
fhand.close()
checksum = hashlib.md5(data).hexdigest()
You should create a dictionary where the checksum is the key and the file name is the value. When you compute a checksum and it is already in the dictionary as a key, you have two files with duplicate content, so print out the file in the dictionary and the file you just read. Here is some sample output from a run in a folder of image files:
./2004/11/15-11-04_0923001.jpg ./2004/11/15-11-04_1016001.jpg
./2005/06/28-06-05_1500001.jpg ./2005/06/28-06-05_1502001.jpg
./2006/08/11-08-06_205948_01.jpg ./2006/08/12-08-06_155318_02.jpg
Apparently I sometimes sent the same photo more than once or made a copy of a photo from time to time without deleting the original.