Tags
A very common task for any script is to look for files on the system. My go to method when globbing for files in python is to use pathlib.
Setup
I setup a directory to make some examples about globbing. Here is what the directory looks like.
❯ tree . . ├── content │ ├── hello.md │ ├── hello.py │ ├── me.md │ └── you.md ├── readme.md ├── README.md ├── READMES.md └── setup.py
1 directory, 8 files
Pathlib
Pathlib is a standard library module available in all LTS versions of python at this point.
❯ from pathlib import Path
Creating a Path instance.
# current working directory Path() Path.cwd() # The users home directory Path.home() # Path to a directory by string Path('/path/to/directory') # The users ~/.config directory Path.home() / '.config'
Globbing Examples
The path object has a glob method that allows you to glob for files with a unix style glob pattern to search for files. Note that it gives you a generator. This is great for many use cases, but for examples its easier to turn them to a list to print them out.
If you need some more detail on what globbing is there is a wikipedia article discussing it. I am just showing how to glob with pathlib.
❯ Path().glob("**/*.md") <generator object Path.glob at 0x7fa35adc4f90> ❯ list(Path().glob("**/*.md")) [ PosixPath('readme.md'), PosixPath('READMES.md'), PosixPath('README.md'), PosixPath('content/you.md'), PosixPath('content/me.md'), PosixPath('content/hello.md') ] ❯ list(Path().glob("**/*.py")) [PosixPath('setup.py'), PosixPath('content/hello.py')] ❯ list(Path().glob("*.md")) [PosixPath('readme.md'), PosixPath('READMES.md'), PosixPath('README.md')] ❯ list(Path().glob("*.py")) [PosixPath('setup.py')] ❯ list(Path().glob("**/*hello*")) [PosixPath('content/hello.py'), PosixPath('content/hello.md')] ❯ list(Path().glob("**/REA?ME.md")) [PosixPath('README.md')]