How to copy directory recursively in python and overwrite all

Question

I m trying to copy  home myUser dir1  and all its contents  and their contents  etc   to  home myuser dir2  in python  Furthermore  I want the copy to overwrite everything in dir2    It looks like distutils dir util copy tree might be the right tool for the job  but not sure if there s anything easier more obvious to use for such a simple task   If it is the right tool  how do I use it  According to the docs there are 8 parameters that it takes  Do I have to pass all 8 are just src  dst and update  and if so  how  I m brand new to Python    If there s something out there that s better  can someone give me an example and point me in the right direction  Thanks in advance

User · Answer

In Python 3 8 the dirs exist ok keyword argument was added to shutil copytree     dirs exist ok dictates whether to raise an exception in case dst or any missing parent directory already exists   So  the following will work in recent versions of Python  even if the destination directory already exists  shutil copytree src  dest  dirs exist ok True     3 8  only   One major benefit is that it s more flexible than distutils dir util copy tree   as it takes additional arguments on files to ignore  etc  There is also a draft PEP  PEP 632  associated discussion   which suggests that distutils may be deprecated and then removed in future versions of Python 3

User · Answer

My simple answer  def get files tree src  quot src path quot        req files          for r  d  files in os walk src           for file in files              src file   os path join r  file              src file   src file replace                        if src file endswith   db                    continue             req files append src file       return req files def copy tree force src path  quot  quot  dest path  quot  quot         quot  quot  quot      make sure that all the paths has correct slash characters       quot  quot  quot      for cf in get files tree src src path           df  cf replace src path  dest path          if not os path exists os path dirname df                os makedirs os path dirname df           shutil copy2 cf  df

User · Answer

Have a look at the shutil package  especially rmtree and copytree  You can check if a file   path exists with os paths exists  lt path gt     import shutil import os  def copy and overwrite from path  to path       if os path exists to path           shutil rmtree to path      shutil copytree from path  to path    Vincent was right about copytree not working  if dirs already exist  So distutils is the nicer version  Below is a fixed version of shutil copytree  It s basically copied 1-1  except the first os makedirs   put behind an if-else-construct   import os from shutil import   def copytree src  dst  symlinks False  ignore None       names   os listdir src      if ignore is not None          ignored names   ignore src  names      else          ignored names   set        if not os path isdir dst     This one line does the trick         os makedirs dst      errors          for name in names          if name in ignored names              continue         srcname   os path join src  name          dstname   os path join dst  name          try              if symlinks and os path islink srcname                   linkto   os readlink srcname                  os symlink linkto  dstname              elif os path isdir srcname                   copytree srcname  dstname  symlinks  ignore              else                    Will raise a SpecialFileError for unsupported file types                 copy2 srcname  dstname            catch the Error from the recursive copytree so that we can           continue with other files         except Error  err              errors extend err args 0           except EnvironmentError  why              errors append  srcname  dstname  str why        try          copystat src  dst      except OSError  why          if WindowsError is not None and isinstance why  WindowsError                 Copying file access times may fail on Windows             pass         else              errors extend  src  dst  str why        if errors          raise Error  errors

User · Answer

You can use distutils dir util copy tree  It works just fine and you don t have to pass every argument  only src and dst are mandatory   However in your case you can t use a similar tool likeshutil copytree because it behaves differently  as the destination directory must not exist this function can t be used for overwriting its contents   If you want to use the cp tool as suggested in the question comments beware that using the subprocess module is currently the recommended way for spawning new processes as you can see in the documentation of the os system function

User · Answer

Here s a simple solution to recursively overwrite a destination with a source  creating any necessary directories as it goes   This does not handle symlinks  but it would be a simple extension  see answer by  Michael above    def recursive overwrite src  dest  ignore None       if os path isdir src           if not os path isdir dest               os makedirs dest          files   os listdir src          if ignore is not None              ignored   ignore src  files          else              ignored   set           for f in files              if f not in ignored                  recursive overwrite os path join src  f                                        os path join dest  f                                        ignore      else          shutil copyfile src  dest

[python] How to copy directory recursively in python and overwrite all?

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