How to move a file

Question

I looked into the Python os interface  but was unable to locate a method to move a file  How would I do the equivalent of   mv     in Python    gt  gt  gt  source files     PATH TO FOLDER     gt  gt  gt  destination folder    PATH TO FOLDER   gt  gt  gt    equivalent of   mv source files destination folder

User · Accepted Answer

os rename    shutil move    or os replace    All employ the same syntax   import os import shutil  os rename  path to current file foo    path to new destination for file foo   shutil move  path to current file foo    path to new destination for file foo   os replace  path to current file foo    path to new destination for file foo     Note that you must include the file name  file foo  in both the source and destination arguments  If it is changed  the file will be renamed as well as moved   Note also that in the first two cases the directory in which the new file is being created must already exist  On Windows  a file with that name must not exist or an exception will be raised  but os replace   will silently replace a file even in that occurrence   As has been noted in comments on other answers  shutil move simply calls os rename in most cases  However  if the destination is on a different disk than the source  it will instead copy and then delete the source file

User · Answer

This is what I m using at the moment   import os  shutil path     volume1 Users Transfer   moveto     volume1 Users Drive Transfer   files   os listdir path  files sort   for f in files      src   path f     dst   moveto f     shutil move src dst    Now fully functional  Hope this helps you   Edit   I ve turned this into a function  that accepts a source and destination directory  making the destination folder if it doesn t exist  and moves the files   Also allows for filtering of the src files  for example if you only want to move images  then you use the pattern    jpg   by default  it moves everything in the directory  import os  shutil  pathlib  fnmatch  def move dir src  str  dst  str  pattern  str             if not os path isdir dst           pathlib Path dst  mkdir parents True  exist ok True      for f in fnmatch filter os listdir src   pattern           shutil move os path join src  f   os path join dst  f

User · Answer

Although os rename   and shutil move   will both rename files  the command that is closest to the Unix mv command is shutil move     The difference is that os rename   doesn t work if the source and destination are on different disks  while shutil move   doesn t care what disk the files are on

User · Answer

For either the os rename or shutil move you will need to import the module   No   character is necessary to get all the files moved     We have a folder at  opt awesome called source with one file named awesome txt     in  opt awesome     ls source     ls source awesome txt  python   gt  gt  gt  source     opt awesome source   gt  gt  gt  destination     opt awesome destination   gt  gt  gt  import os  gt  gt  gt  os rename source  destination   gt  gt  gt  os listdir   opt awesome     destination     We used os listdir to see that the folder name in fact changed  Here s the shutil moving the destination back to source      gt  gt  gt  import shutil  gt  gt  gt  shutil move destination  source   gt  gt  gt  os listdir   opt awesome source     awesome txt     This time I checked inside the source folder to be sure the awesome txt file I created exists   It is there      Now we have moved a folder and its files from a source to a destination and back again

User · Answer

import os shutil    current path         source path    new path         destination path    os chdir current path     for files in os listdir             os rename files  new path      format f           shutil move files  new path      format f      to move files from    different disk ex  C  --  D

User · Answer

The accepted answer is not the right one  because the question is not about renaming a file into a file  but moving many files into a directory  shutil move will do the work  but for this purpose os rename is useless  as stated on comments  because destination must have an explicit file name

User · Answer

This is solution  which does not enables shell using mv  from subprocess import Popen  PIPE  STDOUT  source    quot path to current file foo quot    destination    quot path to new destination for file foo quot   p   Popen   quot mv quot    quot -v quot   source  destination   stdout PIPE  stderr STDOUT  output      p communicate   output   output strip   decode  quot utf-8 quot   if p returncode      print f quot E   output  quot   else      print output

User · Answer

After Python 3 4  you can also use pathlib s class Path to move file   from pathlib import Path  Path  path to current file foo   rename  path to new destination for file foo     https   docs python org 3 4 library pathlib html pathlib Path rename

User · Answer

Based on the answer described here  using subprocess is another option     Something like this   subprocess call  mv  s  s     source files  destination folder   shell True    I am curious to know the pro s and con s of this method compared to shutil   Since in my case I am already using subprocess for other reasons and it seems to work I am inclined to stick with it   Is it system dependent maybe

[python] How to move a file?

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