[python] Copy multiple files in Python

How to copy all the files present in one directory to another directory using Python. I have the source path and the destination path as string.

This question is related to python file copy

The answer is


def recursive_copy_files(source_path, destination_path, override=False):
    """
    Recursive copies files from source  to destination directory.
    :param source_path: source directory
    :param destination_path: destination directory
    :param override if True all files will be overridden otherwise skip if file exist
    :return: count of copied files
    """
    files_count = 0
    if not os.path.exists(destination_path):
        os.mkdir(destination_path)
    items = glob.glob(source_path + '/*')
    for item in items:
        if os.path.isdir(item):
            path = os.path.join(destination_path, item.split('/')[-1])
            files_count += recursive_copy_files(source_path=item, destination_path=path, override=override)
        else:
            file = os.path.join(destination_path, item.split('/')[-1])
            if not os.path.exists(file) or override:
                shutil.copyfile(item, file)
                files_count += 1
    return files_count

import os
import shutil
os.chdir('C:\\') #Make sure you add your source and destination path below

dir_src = ("C:\\foooo\\")
dir_dst = ("C:\\toooo\\")

for filename in os.listdir(dir_src):
    if filename.endswith('.txt'):
        shutil.copy( dir_src + filename, dir_dst)
    print(filename)

Look at shutil in the Python docs, specifically the copytree command.

If the destination directory already exists, try:

shutil.copytree(source, destination, dirs_exist_ok=True)

If you don't want to copy the whole tree (with subdirs etc), use or glob.glob("path/to/dir/*.*") to get a list of all the filenames, loop over the list and use shutil.copy to copy each file.

for filename in glob.glob(os.path.join(source_dir, '*.*')):
    shutil.copy(filename, dest_dir)

Here is another example of a recursive copy function that lets you copy the contents of the directory (including sub-directories) one file at a time, which I used to solve this problem.

import os
import shutil

def recursive_copy(src, dest):
    """
    Copy each file from src dir to dest dir, including sub-directories.
    """
    for item in os.listdir(src):
        file_path = os.path.join(src, item)

        # if item is a file, copy it
        if os.path.isfile(file_path):
            shutil.copy(file_path, dest)

        # else if item is a folder, recurse 
        elif os.path.isdir(file_path):
            new_dest = os.path.join(dest, item)
            os.mkdir(new_dest)
            recursive_copy(file_path, new_dest)

EDIT: If you can, definitely just use shutil.copytree(src, dest). This requires that that destination folder does not already exist though. If you need to copy files into an existing folder, the above method works well!


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