How to use glob() to find files recursively?

Posted By: Anonymous

This is what I have:

glob(os.path.join('src','*.c'))

but I want to search the subfolders of src. Something like this would work:

glob(os.path.join('src','*.c'))
glob(os.path.join('src','*','*.c'))
glob(os.path.join('src','*','*','*.c'))
glob(os.path.join('src','*','*','*','*.c'))

But this is obviously limited and clunky.

Solution

pathlib.Path.rglob

Use pathlib.Path.rglob from the the pathlib module, which was introduced in Python 3.5.

from pathlib import Path

for path in Path('src').rglob('*.c'):
    print(path.name)

If you don’t want to use pathlib, use can use glob.glob('**/*.c'), but don’t forget to pass in the recursive keyword parameter and it will use inordinate amount of time on large directories.

For cases where matching files beginning with a dot (.); like files in the current directory or hidden files on Unix based system, use the os.walk solution below.

os.walk

For older Python versions, use os.walk to recursively walk a directory and fnmatch.filter to match against a simple expression:

import fnmatch
import os

matches = []
for root, dirnames, filenames in os.walk('src'):
    for filename in fnmatch.filter(filenames, '*.c'):
        matches.append(os.path.join(root, filename))

Answered By: Anonymous

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