Running a python script on all the files in a directory

Question

I have a Python script that reads through a text csv file and creates a playlist file. However I can only do one at a time, like:

python playlist.py foo.csv foolist.txt

However, I have a directory of files that need to be made into a playlist, with different names, and sometimes a different number of files.

So far I have looked at creating a txt file with a list of all the names of the file in the directory, then loop through each line of that, however I know there must be an easier way to do it.

and some times there are more than overs what does it mean? — SilentGhost
– SilentGhost, Commented Apr 9, 2010 at 16:36
@davr; why'd you remove the bash tag, maybe he wants to use it? — falstro
– falstro, Commented Apr 9, 2010 at 16:41
Sorry I had the bash tag, as I was trying to do it through bash, as eventually I want to put a cocoa front end for bash. The cheap hack I used from reading from text files was in bash too. — S1syphus
– S1syphus, Commented Apr 9, 2010 at 20:10

falstro · Accepted Answer · 2010-04-09 16:39:53Z

for f in *.csv; do python playlist.py "$f" "${f%.csv}list.txt" done

Will that do the trick? This will put foo.csv in foolist.txt and abc.csv in abclist.txt.

Or do you want them all in the same file?

Daniel DiPaolo · Accepted Answer · 2010-04-09 16:35:57Z

Just use a for loop with the asterisk glob, making sure you quote things appropriately for spaces in filenames

for file in *.csv; do python playlist.py "$file" >> outputfile.txt; done

user297250 · Accepted Answer · 2010-04-09 16:59:48Z

Is it a single directory, or nested?

Ex.

topfile.csv topdir --dir1 --file1.csv --file2.txt --dir2 --file3.csv --file4.csv

For nested, you can use os.walk(topdir) to get all the files and dirs recursively within a directory.

You could set up your script to accept dirs or files:

python playlist.py topfile.csv topdir

import sys import os def main(): files_toprocess = set() paths = sys.argv[1:] for p in paths: if os.path.isfile(p) and p.endswith('.csv'): files_toprocess.add(p) elif os.path.isdir(p): for root, dirs, files in os.walk(p): files_toprocess.update([os.path.join(root, f) for f in files if f.endswith('.csv')])

I'll give this a try too thanks, it's a bit temperamental the script as it is

SilentGhost · Accepted Answer · 2010-04-09 16:35:33Z

if you have directory name you can use os.listdir

os.listdir(dirname)

if you want to select only a certain type of file, e.g., only csv file you could use glob module.

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