This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz by Jarno Virtanen. Original Post: The nicety of the path module Feed Title: Python owns us Feed URL: http://sedoparking.com/search/registrar.php?domain=®istrar=sedopark Feed Description: A weblog about Python from the view point of Jarno Virtanen. Latest Python Buzz Posts Latest Python Buzz Posts by Jarno Virtanen Latest Posts From Python owns us

A co-worker of mine wanted to know the amount of files in directories, recursively from a certain directory. He suspected that there is a find one-liner that could do it, but failing to figure that out, he decided to use Python. Now, I haven't seen his solution, but given that he probably used the standard library os.path.walk and the like, I bet it's a bit more complicated than the following code that uses Jason Orendorff's path module (and additionally sorts the output based on the amount of files):

import sys
from path import path
# the path that we start recursing from
root = path(sys.argv[1])
directory_list = []
# iterate recursively through the directories and count the files
for directory in root.walkdirs():
    directory_list.append((len(directory.files()), directory))
# sort it
directory_list.sort()
# .. and display the list
for count, directory in directory_list:
    print '%5d %s' % (count, directory)

I want my Python to play nicely with files and directories and Orendorff's path module makes it a lot easier.