[python] Python recursive folder read

TL;DR: This is the equivalent to find -type f to go over all files in all folders below and including the current one:

for currentpath, folders, files in os.walk('.'):
    for file in files:
        print(os.path.join(currentpath, file))

As already mentioned in other answers, os.walk() is the answer, but it could be explained better. It's quite simple! Let's walk through this tree:

docs/
+-- doc1.odt
pics/
todo.txt

With this code:

for currentpath, folders, files in os.walk('.'):
    print(currentpath)

The currentpath is the current folder it is looking at. This will output:

.
./docs
./pics

So it loops three times, because there are three folders: the current one, docs, and pics. In every loop, it fills the variables folders and files with all folders and files. Let's show them:

for currentpath, folders, files in os.walk('.'):
    print(currentpath, folders, files)

This shows us:

# currentpath  folders           files
.              ['pics', 'docs']  ['todo.txt']
./pics         []                []
./docs         []                ['doc1.odt']

So in the first line, we see that we are in folder ., that it contains two folders namely pics and docs, and that there is one file, namely todo.txt. You don't have to do anything to recurse into those folders, because as you see, it recurses automatically and just gives you the files in any subfolders. And any subfolders of that (though we don't have those in the example).

If you just want to loop through all files, the equivalent of find -type f, you can do this:

for currentpath, folders, files in os.walk('.'):
    for file in files:
        print(os.path.join(currentpath, file))

This outputs:

./todo.txt
./docs/doc1.odt

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